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THE NEW OPPORTUNITY 
OF THE CHURCH 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



The New Opportunity of 
the Church 



BY 

ROBERT E. SPEER 



I13eto gotfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1919 

JLU rights reserved 



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Copyright, 1919 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, March, 1919 






APR -2 1919 

©CI.A515104 



I 



PREFACE 

This little book is not an attempt to prescribe any pro- 
gram or method of reconstruction or to define in any 
comprehensive way the present tasks of the Christian 
Church. A good deal more is called for to-day than this 
little volume at all considers. Good will and earnest 
purpose are not enough. There must be also careful 
and competent thinking out of the economic and social 
problems involved in the next forward steps in human 
progress. But good will and earnest purpose must be 
back of all such thinking and it is for good will and 
earnest purpose that this little book appeals. In the 
midst of much hesitation and questioning it is a simple 
word of summons and reassurance, in the faith of the 
motto written over the door of the old hotel in Duala, 
in Kamerun, *' The old falls. The times will change. 
And new life will blossom from the ruins." 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Some Dangers and Duties of the Present 

Hour i 

II The Present Business of the Church . 17 

III The Effect of the War on Christian 

Convictions and Ideals 32 

IV The Duty of a Larger Christian Co- 

operation 63 

'V The War Aims and Foreign Missions . . 89 



THE NEW OPPORTUNITY OF 
THE CHURCH 



SOME DANGERS AND DUTIES OF THE PRESENT HOUR 

There is a military maxim in the First Book of Kings 
which we know from our own experience to be wise and 
just. " Let not him that girdeth on his armor boast 
himself as he that putteth it off.** The hour when a man 
or a nation is about to engage in a great struggle is no 
time for relaxation and ease. There are three sure perils 
which confront men then, the peril of over confidence, 
the peril of underestimating the foe, and the peril of a lack 
of unity, foresight and vigilance and of willingness to pay 
all necessary costs. In the face of perils like these there 
is no room for self contentment or praise. Let these wait 
until the victory has been won. *' Let not him that 
girdeth on his armor boast himself as he that putteth it 
off." 

But we have discovered that the converse of this warn- 
ing is equally true. ** Let not him that putteth off his 
armor boast himself as he that girdeth it on." The 
same perils that meet men and nations at the beginning 
of a war meet them at the end. There is the peril of 
over confidence. There is the peril of underestimating 

I 



2 The New Opportunity of the Church 

the task. There is the peril of a lack of unity, vigilance 
and prevision and of willingness to pay the price of peace. 
And men may succumb to these perils at the end who 
overcame them at the beginning. Again and again men 
and nations have lost after the struggle the very things 
which they entered and endured the struggle to achieve. 
" The morrow of victory," Mazzini said, ** is more peril- 
ous than its eve.'' We begin to perceive this to-day. 
" Gentlemen," said Clemenceau a few days after the 
armistice was signed to a group of French senators who 
had waylaid him with congratulations, " our difficult time 
is just approaching. It is harder to win peace than to 
win war." We are realizing now that this is true and 
that if we are negligent we may lose in the hour of vic- 
tory some of the very things which the victory was won 
to achieve. 

We see the dangers of these after-struggle times again 
and again in those authentic pictures of life of which the 
Bible as a transcript of life is full. A useful Christian 
minister in a recent sermon called attention to the vivid 
touch in Noah's history. The flood had washed the 
world clean. Old institutions, old lusts, old vices, old 
wrongs had been wiped out. Men had a chance to begin 
afresh and to build a new world. And w^here was the 
man to whom the duty and the glory of the reconstruc- 
tion came? Drunk and morally shameless in his tent. 
We come upon the same failure in Elijah. He had met 
the organized superstition and corruption of the nation 
in one dramatic encounter and had defeated it. The 
ground was cleared for a new order and instead of girding 
himself to his uncompleted task and establishing the foun- 
dations of righteousness, the old warrior who had not 



Dangers and Duties 3 

been afraid of the massed forces of fraud and wrong but 
single handed had overthrown them, is cowed by the 
threat of a bad woman and goes ofE alone, abandoning his 
work, to sit down under a bush in the wilderness and 
comfort himself with the thought of his spiritual isolation. 
Even so we face our dangers to-day, not less real or 
subtle or perilous than the dangers of the war. There 
is the danger of moral relaxation. Four days after the 
armistice was signed this warning was sent out from 
Washington : 

" Cessation of hostilities in Europe and disappearance of 
the prospect of meeting the enemy on the battlefield has brought 
an immediate loss of morale among American troops at home 
that is regarded at the War Department as somewhat alarm- 
ing. It is understood that steps to deal with the situation 
already are being prepared. 

"Reports from all divisions on Nov. ii, the date of the 
armistice, without exception contained glowing references to 
the high spirit of the men and to their evident desire for early 
embarkation. Upon news that the armistice had been signed, 
the mental attitude of the individual soldier is said to have 
undergone a marked change. Instead of bombarding his imme- 
diate superiors with queries as to the probable date of en- 
training for the seaboard, he became anxious as to the date 
of his release from service. More serious are reports by 
some commanding officers that their men are exhibiting a 
tendency to view themselves as already released from the 
strict routine of the camps." 

In some camps the tidings of the armistice led to such 
disorder as men would have been severely punished for 
a fortnight before, but the outbreak was so general that 
nothing could be done. In New York City on the night 
of the celebration over the premature peace tidings more 
soldiers and sailors in uniform, it is said, were seen drunk 
on the streets than had been seen before in all the time 



4 The New Opportunity of the Church 

since the war began. In the trenches the change which 
took place was revolutionary. Men had been on the 
keen edge of moral duty, strung to the highest tension 
of loyalty. They had cast up accounts and waited upon 
death. God seemed so near in that hour of deepest need 
and intensest life as almost to be within touch. Then 
in a moment this flamed up and passed. The common- 
ness of uninspired life returned. We feel this moral 
relaxation in ourselves and throughout the nation. Some- 
thing that was here is gone. Much of it, to be sure, 
had to go. We are better off with what self-discipline 
we can secure, than with state discipline under permanent 
military control. 

We have not only undergone a relaxation of moral 
tone. We are witnessing sadly a dissolution of our unity. 
The war bound us together in a new tightness of national 
will and spirit. There are three things which unite men : 
a common love, a common task and a common danger. 
And the common danger seems to be necessary to focus 
the common love and to impose the common task. The 
common love is still here. It is pitiful that we do not 
still recognize the reality and urgency of the common 
task, as great now as the task in the war and more diffi- 
cult. But the common danger is past. And our unity 
is dissolved. It is a good thing to have the imprisoning 
shackles removed from our wonted American liberties, 
but it is tragic to see the schisms and partisanships re- 
opening and the forces divided in antagonism which 
should be united in common undertakings and against 
the common foes of the national character. And it is 
with a sad dismay that we see suspicion displanting our 
international confidence and trust. 



Dangers and Duties 5 

There is also a surrender of idealism. With some it 
is not a surrender. It is only the open disavowal of 
sentiments which they never shared but which the tide 
of the national spirit compelled them to respect while 
the war was going on. Some indeed ventured to deride 
the Quixotic idealism which prevailed but they paid it 
the respect of making their derision anonymous, like 
" the American Jurist " in his articles in the New York 
Times which so pleased the Germans because they were 
the frank application to American politics of the German 
notion of the superiority of the State to any obligation 
except that of its own material interest. Now, however, 
men who rejected the idealism which awakened the 
nation and sustained its soul in the war do not hesitate 
openly to repudiate the very ends for w^hich we fought. 
They propose that w^e should now belie our professions 
and betray the good faith of the nation toward the dead 
who died not for national interest but for principle and 
for humanity and for a new world. 

As against these dangers, and the other dangers than 
these which peace has brought, we need two things. We 
need first the loyalty and patriotism of peace, a more 
difficult even though less glorious thing than the patriot- 
ism and loyalty of war, by as much as it is harder to live 
for a cause than to die for it. It was for such loyalty 
and patriotism that Lincoln appealed in his Gettysburg 
speech: '* It is for us the living to be dedicated here to 
the unfinished work which they who fought here have 
thus far so nobly advanced. It is for us to be here 
dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that 
from these honored dead w^e take increased devotion 
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure 



6 The New Opportunity of the Church 

of devotion/' War did its part. Is peace now to fail 
and be faithless where war was faithful? There is need 
still of the same loyalty and love of country which was 
given in war and which the nation needs not less in 
peace. And, secondly, we need the desire or purpose of 
a new world. Mr. Lloyd George expressed the need 
in an exhortation to a labor deputation in the midst of 
the war: ^^ Don't always be thinking of getting back 
where you were before the war. Get a really new world. 
I firmly believe that what is known as the after-the-war 
settlement will direct the destinies of all classes for gen- 
erations to come. I believe the settlement after the war 
will succeed in proportion to its audacity. The readier 
we are to cut away from the past the better we are likely 
to succeed. Think out new ways, new methods, of deal- 
ing with old problems. I hope no class will be harking 
back to the pre-war conditions. If every class insists 
upon doing that then God help this country. Get a new 
world.'' '' The triumphant close of the great war," says 
Secretary of State Lansing, " does not solve all the prob- 
lems. Society has been shattered in many places. We 
must rebuild it on a better foundation. Materialism 
was largely responsible for this war. We must not sink 
back again to the same level. A strong and vital spirit- 
uality ought to dominate mankind, so that we may rise 
above the greed and selfishness which have corrupted 
mankind and distorted the ideals and purposes of life." 
The war grew out of the past but it was not fought for 
the past, it was fought for the future, to clear the way 
for a different and better world. 

Whether we shall have a better world or not depends 
upon how we meet now the dangers and duties of peace 



Dangers and Duties 7 

and whether we do as effectively the work of winning 
this better world as we did the work of winning the war. 
And for what was the war won if it was not for the sake 
of a better world? What does anybody want with a 
war ? Why should anybody want to win it ? What will 
he do with it? He wins it to be done with it. What 
he wants when he has won it is to lose it. The thing 
to be kept is the thing which the war stood in the way 
of and had to be fought through to make possible — the 
new world behind and beyond it. 

And our present practical question now is what 
Christian men and women and the Christian Church can 
do to win a better world out of the war. 

We can believe a better world to be possible. All 
about us now are the practical men who ridicule the idea 
that war can be destroyed, militarists, munition makers, 
political and commercial imperialists, and theologians who 
think that to try to get rid of war and pestilence is to 
vitiate the authority of the Bible, and a host of others 
who think and say that the world we had before the war 
IS the only kind of world we shall have after it. The 
war did nothing, they say, and some of them say it was 
intended to do nothing, but defeat Germany. Now that 
that end has been achieved other things will continue as 
they were. By the blood of the eight million men who 
died to make a better world possible they shall do noth- 
ing of the kind. It is quite true that the war did not 
introduce the millennium. There were some people who 
held that the millennium had begun in the Nineteenth 
Century. But they were mistaken. It had not begun 
then and it has not begun now. But our effort to make 
the world better does not have to await the coming of 



8 The New Opportunity of the Church 

the millennium before it can hope to accomplish anything. 
Christendom has got rid of legalized polygamy and slav- 
ery. It is doing away with the saloon and the brothel. 
The time has come when it can get rid of war. If we 
do not it will be our own fault. If we don't want to 
be rid of war it will stay. If we prepare for it we shall 
have it. But if we want to be done with it we can be. 
If we prepare for peace it will be peace we shall have. 
The way to get a world where it prevails, a world of 
righteousness and truth and progress is to believe in such 
a world as a possibility, to cherish large and generous 
thoughts of what can be by man's good will and the grace 
of God. And as Lloyd George says there is no reason 
why we should not be bold about it. We can do now 
just what we want done and will pay the price for and 
are willing to let God do through us. There are laws 
of human progress and of social change, no doubt, but the 
laws that shall operate now will be laws of relapse and 
of immobility or they will be laws of progress, as we 
shall decide. We may indeed drop back into the old 
world and carry its principles of suspicion, rivalry, self- 
interest, on into the future, or we can believe in the 
possibility of something better. Why not now? We 
have discarded the authority of the old limitations in 
nature. As the Panama Canal diggers' song declares : 

" Got any rivers they say are uncrossable? 

Got any mountains you can't tunnel through? 
We specialize on the wholly impossible 

Doing the thing that no man can do." 

Why not discard the authority of the old limitations in 
moral and social achievement? Samuel C. Armstrong 



Dangers and Duties 9 

discarded them after the Civil War and began a new 
era of racial education. We may begin a new era of 
racial and national relationship if we will. The limita- 
tions and hindrances are not in God or in nature but in us. 
We can help to win a new world by seeing clearly the 
evils which are to be overthrown and the enemies who 
still remain to be vanquished. The war has for a season 
vividly revealed these. War inflames. It also illumines. 
The inflammations are dying down. Let us hope that the 
illuminations may not fade. They showed us what iniq- 
uity is and what also is its sure fruitage. Incarnated 
in German militarism and its principles and methods 
of war we saw just how hideous and deadly certain 
ideas and moral qualities really are. And well nigh the 
whole world rose up in horror and self-defense against 
what w-e saw. But now that German militarism has 
been defeated and the war won we need to beware of los- 
ing the horror and the sense of the need of protection 
against these same ideas and iniquities. If they were 
wrong in Germany in the war they are not less wTong 
anywhere else in peace. They are wrong if they exist in 
us, and they will as surely bring punishment upon us as 
they brought it on Germany. Furthermore the w^ar 
demonstrated to the nation that certain social evils are 
fatal to the creation and maintenance of an army and 
that these evils are not invincible. Drink and lust were 
seen to be deadly enemies of efficiency in war and the 
nation shut them off from the army. Always before, 
men said that this could not be done, that soldiers must 
be fed on drink and lust. Now w^e know that it is not 
true. But if drink and lust are bad for soldiers why 
are they not bad for civilians too? If the nation can 



lo The New Opportunity of the Church 

not afford to tolerate them in time of war how can it 
afford to tolerate them in time of peace? The same 
ideal of effective service needed in war is needed now 
in the civil and industrial life of the nation. As General 
Pershing said in a message to the home churches through 
the Federal Council: "We expect not only to vindicate 
the cause of justice and honor and righteousness but 
also to lay a solid foundation for world peace. We dare 
not claim that, as an Army, w^e have yet achieved that 
high standard of manhood and conduct upon which the 
largest human effectiveness should be built, but the ideal 
of the Nation and of the churches is constantly before 
us. With sincerity and firm purpose we set our faces 
toward the goal. After all, it is a common fight — yours 
there and ours here. What is necessary for the manhood 
of the soldier is necessary for the manhood of the citizen." 
By seeing this and insisting now upon the continuing 
and universal validity of the moral ideals essential to 
the life of the nation in peace as well as in war, we can 
help on a different order. It is quite true that men 
cannot be made moral by law, but immorality can be 
made difficult and help can be given to that which is not 
bad, but only weak. 

We can help by supporting the men, the measures 
and the movements which are directed to bringing in 
new times. We can begin this in our own community. 
Each community is a microcosm of the nation. It is 
the nation in miniature. In our own community we can 
support the men and the movements that look forward 
and not back. We can ask regarding each local measure. 
Would this, magnified to the scale of the nation help or 
hinder? Would it sustain the new time? This demand 



Dangers and Duties II 

for different ways does not cover everything. The fund 
of our sohd moral and economic achievement is not to be 
destroyed. Progress is not the dissolution of organiza- 
tion. It is its development. The human society which 
represents the highest amount of mutual interdependence, 
while most difficult, will in the end be the happiest. St. 
Paul's ideal of humanity is a human body, the most 
intricate organization which w^e know. Names ought 
not to terrify us, nor the inequality of men in other days 
to meet the demands which some day men must meet 
if the will of God is to be done on the earth. The 
men who discredit unselfishness, who hold by mercantile 
principles alone, w^ho disbelieve in any but the old world, 
although the old world itself was new in its time, and 
has only now worn out, who are willing to lead us no- 
where but backward must understand that the faces of 
those who once followed are turned in the other direction 
and that they intend to move forward. 

And a new order is to be won, not by change only 
but also by a steadfast immovableness. There must be 
men and w^omen who will stand fast for absolute moral 
principles without yielding or compromise. It goes with- 
out saying that there will be need of compromise as to 
method and process. Compromise in these things is only 
another name for patience. But when it comes to prin- 
ciple, progress is made not by abatement or surrender 
but by unbending loyalty. And inferior men with clear 
vision of right principles and high ideals are better men 
for us than the clever sophists who repudiate the theo- 
logical doctrine of human depravity and whose political 
philosophy nevertheless uses that doctrine to justify what 
no theology in which Christian men have ever believed 



12 The New Opportunity of the Church 

can be got to condone. As we face the issues of this 
time when men have to choose between courses of action 
decisive in their result for many years to come, we need 
the creative spirit of the binding grip of right principle 
which holds fast and will not make sacrifice or com- 
promise. We need the Webster of January 26, 1830, 
not the Webster of March 7, 1850. It is good for our 
weakness and timidity to turn back to these two great 
days, and to pray that the God of truth may keep u? from 
Webster's mistake on that tragic seventh of March when 
the foundations slipped and the strong tower stood fast 
no more. Not now the flashing lightning and the rolling 
thunder of the answers to Calhoun and Hayne but only 
a great mountain sliding in the rain! And Webster 
knew that the blunder had been made. Thenceforth, 
as Mr. Lodge says, " he was disturbed and ill at ease. 
He never admitted it, even to himself, but his mind was 
not at peace, and he could not conceal the fact. Pos- 
terity can see the evidences of it plainly enough, and a 
man of his intellect and fame knew that with posterity 
the final reckoning must be made. No man can say that 
Webster anticipated the unfavorable judgment which his 
countrymen have passed upon his conduct, but that in his 
heart he feared such a judgment cannot be doubted. 
If the 7th of March speech was right, then all that had 
gone before was false and wrong. In that speech he 
broke from his past, from his own principles and from 
the principles of New England, and closed his splendid 
public career with a terrible mistake." So far as the 
past has rested on wrong principles the time has come 
for breaking from it. So far as the present needs new 



Dangers and Duties 13 

principles the time has come for asserting them. It 
should be done in the new peace. As Life remarked 
recently, we want none of the old style diplomatic doc- 
tors around now sewing sponges in the wounds which 
they are closing up, to fester and breed new trouble and 
disease. The world wants a clean and just piece of work 
done now and done once for all. 

And a clean and just piece of work needs to be done 
in each one of us. We can best bring in a better world 
by being ourselves better men. As Mr. Balfour remarked 
when the war was nearing its end, we want a new world 
but can only have it as we ourselves get new hearts. 
The limitations of human nature are constantly urged 
as an insuperable objection to the efforts and the vision of 
the moral idealists, but those men will worry least about 
these limitations in events who are most conscientiously 
seeking to transcend them in their own lives. While the 
broad social forces are at their renovating work under the 
hand of God, our personal privilege is to augment them 
by our ow^n renewal in the image of Christ, the one Right 
Man and the Head of Humanity. His kind of world, 
the Kingdom of God on earth, can only be built on His 
kind of men. If I want a new world I must be the kind 
of a man I want the new world to be. If I am not 
willing to pay this price what honesty is there in my 
talk of a Golden Year? As Newman challenges us: 

" Thou to wax fierce 
In the cause of the Lord ! 
Anger and zeal 
And the joy of the brave, 
Who bade thee to feel, 
Sin's slave?" 



14 The New Opportunity of the Church 

If men honestly want a world of good will and brother- 
hood let them be the men St. Paul demands in his de- 
scription in First Thessalonians of the Christian citizen 
— a man of purity, honesty, holiness, brotherliness, in- 
dustry, modesty, thrift, courage. In personal life and 
social relationships, in family and business, each of us 
has his chance to hasten a new human order, by intro- 
ducing here in the ranges nearest him the principles of 
a new time, the old principles of Jesus, the Carpenter, 
the Teacher, the Friend, the Saviour, the whole great 
Personality and Power whom Isaiah foresaw — we be- 
lieve it of Him, ever^^ word — Wonderful, Counselor, 
Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. 

If the new world is not to be brought nearer then 
what was the war all about? 

" With fire and sword the country round 

Was wasted far and wide 
And many a gentle mother then 

And new born baby died. 

" They say it was a shocking sight, 

After the field was won, 
For many thousand bodies here 

Lay rotting in the sun. 

"But what good came of it at last? 

Quoth little Peterkin, 
* Why that I cannot tell,' said he, 

*But 'twas a famous victory.'" 

Yes, and the victory had to be won at any cost to end 
what refused to die till it was slain. But the men who 
gave their lives to this end had more than this end in 
view. They were dying, with more or less clear appre- 



Dangers and Duties 15 

hension of it, to end an old order and to begin a new. 
And their sacrifice is calling to us to finish what they 
began. 

A group of American soldiers were billeted in a little 
village in Northern France and became warmly attached 
to the village folk and the villagers to them. At last the 
lads were called into action and one of them was brought 
back in the evening to be laid to rest in the soil of France. 
The village folk spoke to their priest about it and asked 
permission to bury the body in their own consecrated 
ground. But the priest said it could not be done. He 
was a good lad but he had not been of their faith. So 
they dug him a grave just outside the cemetery wall and 
laid him to rest there as close as might be to their own 
dead. The next morning the villagers went by and to 
their wonder and delight they found the grave within 
the wall. The old priest had risen in the night and moved 
the wall. 

The new order makes its demand. The walls must 
be moved out. There must be room for the spirit of 
eight million men who died for a larger world. They 
bid us to let the old evils go and to bring in the new 
good, to ring out the slowly dying cause, the ancient forms 
of party strife, the want, the care, the sin, the faithless 
coldness of the times, the old shapes of foul disease, the 
thousand wars of old, and to ring in the nobler modes 
of life, the love of truth and right, the common love of 
good, redress to all m.ankind, the thousand years of peace. 
The dead ask this of us. They have a right to ask it 
and to threaten to stir beneath the Flanders poppies if 
we will not hear. And another and greater One has a 
right to ask it who taught us to pray, and meant that the 



1 6 The New Opportunity of the Church 

prayer should be sincere and true, — Thy Kingdom come, 
Thy Will be done on earth, — in America and in the 
world — to-day, as it is in heaven. It is of man's dis- 
obedience and failure, not of God's will, if that Kingdom 
is not brought nearer now by many a long year. 



II 

THE PRESENT BUSINESS OF THE CHURCH 

The Church has always the same present business. It 
faces new problems, new" tasks, new duties, new tests with 
each new generation. But it comes to each new situation 
with ever the same mission. Old vernaculars pass away 
and men speak in new language. But the Church simply 
translates into the new speech its enduring message. The 
mission and message of the Church, its first and last 
business is religion. 

The Church is charged with this unchanging and un- 
alterable business because human need is unaltering and 
unchanged. The miseries and failures of the world are 
all traceable, straight past everything secondary and de- 
rivative, to sin and irreligion, to wrong and ignorance. 
The present w^ar so far from being an exception is itself 
the tragic symbol of this. Dr. Wotherspoon of Edin- 
burgh has undauntedly set this forth in one of the most 
notable sermons of the times entitled ^' The War and the 
Sin of the World." 

" If we may assume any moral system for the universe 
or any God who judges the Earth, we may also assume a 
connection between these two things — the war which desolates 
the world and the sin of the world. Sin when it is finished 
brings forth death. The sin, it may be further assumed, is 
World Sin; not the sin of individuals and not the crime of some 

17 



1 8 The New Opportunity of the Church 

particular date — the war is a world war, the system which 
has collapsed is a world system; the process leading to the 
collapse must be traced in world history. It is our general 
method of life — our relation to that whole scheme of things 
which includes Heaven with Earth and God with ourselves 
— which has broken down, and is judged, and is condemned. 
The relation is false, the method is unworkable — for they 
have led us to this which we see, and that not by accident 
but logically and naturally, as (if they persisted) they were 
bound to lead. It has been coming for long; whoever was 
not blind to the signs of the times could see it coming — and 
now it has come, this crash of our life — of which the war 
itself is only a symptom, and is the beginning rather than 
the end." 

And Dr. Wotherspoon goes fearlessly on: 

" In spite of our jealousies, racial and political rivalries and 
divergencies, the group of peoples which share the European 
culture form a unity, moral and spiritual. Seen in the large, 
they constitute a single commonwealth. They have one eco- 
nomic life, one social law, one standard of conduct, and one 
method of thought. Their science, their philosophies, their 
literature, their criticism, their art, their religious and spiritual 
movements — even their fashions and their caprices and their 
sports — are international. No one of them thinks alone or 
has originality enough to be capable of intellectual independence 
or even of any profound social eccentricity. All of us have 
built upon the same foundations in much the same manner. 
If there is sin, it is sin of us all, systematic sin, sin of premiss, 
from which we have all reasoned to similar conclusions. Not 
all of us so consistently — not all of us so resolutely — not all 
of us so thoroughly and joyfully. Whatever credit lies in lack 
of logic, some of us may claim that credit. We have not all 
finished and crowned the sin, as one nation has done. But all 
have sinned, and all in one way. * The War,' writes Mr. 
J. H. Campbell, * is the inevitable outcome of the ideals whereby 
our Western civilization has been living, and shows in what 
it trusted, and demonstrated its lack of spiritual consciousness.* 



The Business of the Church 19 

Long ago the somber but powerful imagination of Mr. H. G. 
Wells had discerned this inevitable, and had warned us against 
* the hallucination of security,' and against the assumption of 
an automatic ' progress towards which men had no moral 
responsibility,' and he had predicted — nay, he had almost 
described — the present debacle, of which he discerned the seeds 
germinating in our practice. So, too, Mr. E. A. Burroughs 
finds it: * The war (he says) is the vengeance of the moral 
nature upon the material.' * We had grown accustomed to 
measure progress in material terms and either to minimize our 
moral ailments or to treat them with material remedies.' Mr. 
Burroughs will excuse none of us: — 'British individualism was 
in its way as much a form of animalism and atheism as 
German militarism or worship of expedience.' ' No part of 
the civilization which has perished (he says again) can plead 
Not Guilty to a share in the responsibility — because every- 
where the new paganism was already working in greater or 
less degree or in one form or another.' As compared with 
Germany, * the rest of the nations, combatant or neutral, are 
white only by contrast with black, and would if contrasted 
with white be very gray . . . the fall of Germany is a common 
reproach on human nature, rather than ground of congratulation 
for those other mortals who are not German.' * Others, our- 
selves included, have deserved the cataclysm,' though only 
Germany could have engineered it. 

*' We can, in fact, learn little from what has come upon us, 
unless we recognize that the sin which Germany has, in St. 
Paul's sense 'perfected,' is the sin of the world — a radical vice 
which has run through the entire social detail of our Western 
system; unless we recognize that the judgment which visits 
us is not a heterogeneous retribution — as a man might be 
whipped for stealing, the whipping having no relation to the 
theft except by sentence of the judge: we have to see that it 
is strictly the death which that particular sin contained: we 
are filled with the fruit of our own devices. 

'' Nor do we learn much unless we recognize the sin, what 
it is — that it is the sin of a world which knows God and 
does not glorify Him as God — which does not like to have 
God in its knowledge; that it is the sin of a Christendom 



20 The New Opportunity of the Church 

which confesses Christ, but will not have Him to reign (* His 
citizens sent after Him, saying we will not have this man 
to reign over us'), which has limited His authority to private 
occasions, and has excluded it in social and public affairs; a 
Christendom which has told Christ to mind His own business 
(which is the saving of souls), and to let society and the 
world alone. Germany perfected that sin ; are we clear of 
it? When we saw what the sin perfected is, we revolted 
from it, and so far have cleared ourselves; to God be the 
praise. But hear Mr. Burroughs again: * To approve an 
ideal, or even to fight for it, is nothing unless you also live 
by it and for it.' We have still that to do — when it is no 
longer necessary to fight, then to live by the truth for which 
we have fought." 

This IS the honest diagnosis of the well nigh fatal 
sickness to which we awakened in part at least in the 
war, from which we have to escape and from which we 
can escape in but one way, by turning in peace as, in 
principle, as Mr. Root pointed out, we did turn in the 
war, from Paganism with its principle of the selfish will 
to Christianity with its counter principle of the unselfish 
reason. Colonel Watterson, whose sight grows clearer as 
the evening shadows fall, sees this among his discernings: 

" Surely," said he, " the future looks black enough, yet it 
holds a hope, a single hope. One, and one power only, can 
arrest the descent and save us. That is the Christian religion. 

" Democracy is but a side issue. The paramount issue under- 
lying the issue of Democracy, is the religion of Christ, and 
Him crucified; the bedrock of civilization; the source and 
resource of all that is worth having in the world that is, that 
gives promise in the world to come; not as an abstraction; 
not as a huddle of sects and factions; but as a mighty force 
and principle of being. The Word of God, delivered by the 
gentle Nazarene upon the hillsides of Judea, sanctified by the 
Cross of Calvary, has survived every assault. It is now 



The Business of the Church 21 

arrayed upon land and sea to meet the deadliest of all assaults, 
Satan turned loose for one last, final struggle. . . . 

" If the world is to be saved from destruction — physical 
no less than spiritual destruction — it will be saved alone by 
the Christian religion. That eliminated leaves the earth to 
eternal war." 

The business of the Church as it has always been, and 
now if possible more than it has ever been, is religion. 
It is religion more truly and broadly conceived than ever, 
more conscious of its social responsibility in the nation, 
alive to its mission as the instrumentality of true racial 
interpretation and international service but on these ac- 
counts all the more personal and the more effective in 
purifying and healing the individual cells of the organism 
of each national society and of the body of humanity. 
We may think as freely as we can of the modes of re- 
ligious application to life but we have to realize more 
deeply than ever the need of its judging and restoring 
power. 

To these ends it is the business of the Church to-day 
to discern clearly and to preserve the true sense of its 
own mission. This has been greatly confused by the 
w^ar, in which the Christian Church has been enlisted 
on both sides of a struggle, in which with all necessary 
qualification we believe that one side was morally right 
and the other morally wrong. And the Church's concep- 
tion of its mission was already sufficiently blurred. There 
were too many among us who saw no clear distinction 
between the three great divine institutions, the family, 
the state and the Church. Confusion was not unnatural. 
The same man belonged to all three and could not sepa- 
rate his own functionings in his home, as a citizen and as 



22 The New Opportunity of the Church 

3. Christian. In a sense they can never be separated. 
Each of them is an institute of life and of religion, and 
history is the development of each in itself and of all in 
their interrelations. But the three institutions are there, 
nevertheless, and every error that men make in judging 
and relating them brings in its train its own judgment. 
The Church at least must realize this and seek to protect 
itself and human society from its peril. In the war, 
in the shaping of peace and in the new conditions of 
politics and industry following the war the Church needs 
to know that it has a mission and what its mission is. 
The Church is not a mere agency of government, nor a 
convenient channel of publicity, nor an echo of the state, 
nor a political judge and divider. It is a ministry of 
service, a fountain of moral life and duty and a witness 
to enduring and universal principles. 

There is no room here to deal with all these functions 
but let us single out two elements of the Church's busi- 
ness and seek to make them clear. It is the business 
of the Church, for one thing, to supply ideals for society 
and for humanity and the convictions which must sustain 
such ideals. This is a hopeful time in w^hich to proclaim 
the generous and courageous ideals which men heard from 
Jesus on the hills of Galilee and which the first Christian 
missionaries carried through the Roman world. The dis- 
tortions of those ideals which were seen in the French 
Revolution are abroad in the world again and this time 
they are closer to their originals. Mankind has a heart 
for hopes and dreams and endeavors which recall the eager 
days at the beginning of our national history. But a cen- 
tury has brought a richer and truer understanding of many 
things. Old vagaries and fallacies and false trust and de- 



The Business of the Church 23 

ceptions and self deceptions are with us still, wearing new 
faces and speaking a subtler language. But this is only to 
say that the need as well as the opportunity for the Church 
to go about its business of proclaiming the principles of 
the Kingdom of God is greater than it has ever been. 

And what are the fundamental ideals which the Church 
must express? Professor William Adams Brown has 
stated them with sure Christian discernment in *^ The 
Way Out '* to be righteousness, repentance, service and 
faith. 

(i) Righteousness. Our Lord stated this clearly 
as the primary thing without which there would be 
no beginning and no going on except to evil and dis- 
aster. " Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His 
righteousness.*' It was the central principle of His own 
life and conduct. '^ It becometh us to fulfill all right- 
eousness." It is what God is before He can be thought 
of as being anj^thing else. ^^ Righteousness and jus- 
tice are the foundation of His throne." It is the 
only foundation of human society, of family life, of 
national character, of a world order. The first thing is 
not honor or glory or gain or power. It is righteousness. 
The business of the Church is fearlessly to proclaim this 
and if any nation commits itself to courses of unrighteous- 
ness then the Church has its work set before it which it 
must do and take the consequences. The Church may 
be sure that in the end it will suffer less for defending 
righteousness than for supporting a state in wrong doing. 
To-day especially the message of the Church needs to 
be conceived as a message of moral and social and economic 
and political righteousness. The Lord Jesus is compas- 
sion but He is also truth. And it is refreshing to see 



24 The New Opportunity of the Church 

that latitudinarian interpretations of the Gospel to which 
we have been accustomed in the United States have 
grown very distasteful during the war and that some of 
the most influential preachers of a lax gospel are now 
become the prophets of the righteous law of God and the 
messengers of the judgment as well as the mercy of Christ. 
They see^ now what Mr. Ikeda, the heroic suffering 
Japanese pastor, saw when in pain and poverty he spent 
his ebbing strength on the Japanese biography of St. 
Bernard. A friend suggested to him that St. Bernard 
w^as but little known in Japan and that a life of St. 
Francis would be more popular and more acceptable to 
the publishers. Mr. Ikeda said that he felt that, too, 
and had long revered St. Francis, but there was a reason. 
*' St. Francis," said he, '' stands for Love — selfless, gentle, 
self-sacrificing love, — love alone. There is great power 
in that, but it is not enough. There is evil in men's 
hearts, and that evil must be fought against and subdued. 
Only so can men be saved. Not St. Francis, but St. 
Bernard is the man who combines in himself both these 
principles, love and the aggressive, fighting spirit, and so 
I thought it would perhaps serve Christ best if I intro- 
duced St. Bernard to the Japanese Church." It is the 
principle of righteousness alone which has justified our 
participation in the war. To the nation believing this, 
the whole claim of righteousness between nation and 
nation, and class and class, and man and man, and of a 
righteous God, and the sin of all unrighteousness may be 
proclaimed with new power. 

(2) Repentance. That v/ord was so instantly inter- 
twined with righteousness by our Lord that some may 
dispute whether with us as with Him it does not belong 



The Business of the Church 25 

in the first place. At any rate it is for unrighteousness 
that men need to repent. We need it. Germany and 
Austria and Turkey need it to be sure. But men and 
nations must do their own repenting. Others can not 
do it for them. We need to do our own. One of the 
most curious phenomena of the war has been the resent- 
ment which this idea has encountered in Great Britain 
and America. Any reminder that we had motes or beams 
in our own eyes, that the hands that held the chalice 
of freedom in the name of God must be clean, that the 
strength of ten belongs only to the pure heart, was 
denounced as the seditious talk of a pacifist, forgetting 
that the battle is in God's hands and that we have Him 
to deal with as well as the enemy. Perhaps now the 
word of truth may be endured. God knows how deeply 
it is needed. The war has led to a great moral cleansing 
in America but the work has only begun and with such 
unflinching exposure of our sins and such sincere peni- 
tence and such purpose of a new obedience as will alone 
avert God's judgment and receive His blessing men 
await the call and moral leadership of the Church. '* I 
do not know when this war against the German Empire 
will come to an end," said the Secretary of War on 
November 4th, '* but I know this, that the war for the 
salvation of young American manhood has only just 
begun, and that it is going to keep up." The spirit of 
penitence alone, not the spirit of the Pharisee, can sustain 
this war. 

(3) Service. The participation of our country in the 
war was simply an act of service on the part of a whole 
people. We saw more and more clearly as the struggle 
went on that we had vital interests at stake but it was not 



26 The New Opportunity of the Church 

for interests that America entered. It was to serve the 
righteous cause and mankind, and never before has a 
nation poured out such energies of service in armies, in 
relief, in welfare ministry. We have expressed in time 
of war the enthusiasm of human brotherhood, of the equal 
liberty of mankind. Whence came this ideal of unselfish- 
ness, of laying down our life for others, of using strength 
for service, of living and dying for truth and for hu- 
manity? Does any one doubt whence it came? That 
ideal of service at any cost, of doing duty for nothing, 
of counting the individual in his interest and his life as 
only a means of advancement for the whole human cause 
— this the Church must hold up in peace when it will be 
vastly harder for men to live by it than it was in war. 
(4) Faith. The world has wrecked its material in- 
terests for the sake of moral ideals and ends. Wealth 
and ease and comfort and all things have been conceived 
in their true character as means to invisible ends. The 
world, as will be pointed out later, has accepted the con- 
tention of the Christian faith that the supreme values 
are moral and unseen. How long will the acceptance 
last? We may be sure that the struggle is not over. 
It is as old as history. The eleventh and twelfth 
centuries saw it in strangely confused form between St. 
Anselm and William the Red. We shall never see it 
in that form again. It is a struggle of far purer prin- 
ciple now. If we are to have a new world it must be 
built upon the foundation of faith, Jesus Christ Him- 
self being the chief corner stone. To speak this word 
of faith is the present business of the Church — faith 
in God, in the reality and supremacy of the moral and 
spiritual values, interests and forces, faith in man. This 



The Business of the Church 27 

last not least. We need to acquire the human faith 
which Paul held and to which he called men, *' faith 
in the Lord Jesus and unto all saints/* (Eph. 1.15.) 
We have reaped enough death from human tnwy and 
distrust. 

It is the business of the Church to be the deliverer 
of this message of righteousness, repentance, service and 
faith in each nation. It is to be also an international 
instrumentality, the institute of humanity, as the family 
is the institute of the affections and the state the institute of 
rights. One great source of our troubles has been our 
racial and national isolation and selfishness. The war has 
been at once the fruit and the corrective of this. For the 
corrective we have ever>^ reason to be thankful. We 
have been taught that there is no such thing as comfort- 
able separation from the rest of the world. We may 
disbelieve in entangling alliances but there is no escape 
from the entanglements. We see that our own safety 
depends on conditions without. We do not talk now 
of saving America to save the world but of saving the 
world in order to save America. To make American 
democracy safe we have had to wage a war in Europe. 
The Church has a work of redemption to do among these 
interests and ideas. It ought to conserve the good of 
nationalism, disciplining and inspiring the genius of each 
separate nation. And it ought to master its evil in the 
interest of humanity and reveal to each nationality its 
true glory which is to be found in the perfection of 
national character and the fulfillment of national power 
as the essential contribution of each people to the full 
life of the whole of mankind. 

The Church's universal business was never clearer. 



28 The New Opportunity of the Church 

The central organizations of Islam have broken down. 
Mecca remains but not the Mecca of old. Some day 
even the long sealed city will be a mission station, w^hile 
already the iron bands that girt the Mohammedan peo- 
ples and the Mohammedan faith have been rent. New 
ties of sympathy and of confidence relate the Latin Ameri- 
can nations to us and new realizations of moral and social 
need open them to the Bible, and the Living Christ. 
The streams of democratic influence and of moral energy 
springing from one great fountain, though flowing through 
various channels, are pouring up through the forms and 
institutions of government and society in Japan. The 
critical period in Chinese history is too analogous to the 
corresponding years in our own national past to leave us 
cold or unsympathetic toward the struggle of the contend- 
ing forces of corruption and progress in China, where it 
can not be that God will allow the evil to prevail, and 
where all that is true and honest calls for Christianity 
as the one hope of the nation. In India the British Gov- 
ernment is redeeming its pledges of the past and providing 
for a measure of self-government that will put great 
sections of India's affairs in the hands of the Indian 
people themselves, and that will reveal to India more 
clearly than it has yet been revealed the incompatibility 
of Hinduism and Islam alike with free institutions and 
democratic brotherhood. And the war clouds which have 
darkened Europe have not illuminated Africa, although 
they have helped Africa to realize its need of light. And 
in South Eastern Asia — the Philippine Islands and Siam, 
so alike and so different, a people awakened and a 
people to be awakened, want what politics and trade 
can give in part but yet can not give at all — a new 



The Business of the Church 29 

quickening of life, a new strength of soul, a salvation 
which can come by Christ alone. 

There may be diversity of judgment as to the method 
by which the Church shall function as the institute of 
humanity, whether, as some think, by seeking to spread 
an international ecclesiastical organization or, as others 
of us believe, by fostering in each nation its own living 
Christian agency, which shall supply the directing principle 
of the national genius. But however we may differ as 
to the method, the end is clear. We must replace the 
ideals and fears and organizations of war by the ideals 
and hopes and organizations of peace. Cooperation and 
common gain must be substituted for conflict and partisan 
advantage. '' Peace to find United States ready for War 
of Trade,'^ in the " War after the War ** — these are 
phrases from a newspaper account of the Fifth National 
Foreign Trade Convention held in Cincinnati in April, 
191 8. But the Church must preach a new order of 
helpful association from which all shall gain, not a war 
of interest against interest in which both must ultimately 
lose. In government as in trade, the Church has an 
ideal and a spirit to offer to men. And the wise and 
true men are laying hold upon it. Viscount Grey is 
uttering a religious word when he lays it down as one 
of the foundations of the League of Nations ** that the 
Governments and peoples of the States willing to found 
It understand clearly that it will impose some limitations 
upon the national action of each, and may entail some 
inconvenient obligation. Smaller and weaker nations will 
have rights that must be respected and upheld by the 
league. Stronger nations must forego the right to make 
their interests prevail against the weaker by force, and 



30 The New Opportunity of the Church 

all States must forego the right in any dispute to resort 
to force before other methods of settlement by confer- 
ence, conciliation, or if need be arbitration, have been 
tried. This is the limitation. The obligation is that if 
any nation will not observe this limitation upon its na- 
tional actions, if it breaks the agreement which is the 
basis of the league, rejects all peaceful methods of settle- 
ment and resorts to force against another nation, they 
must one and all use their combined force against it.*' 
This is only the word of order and of righteousness. 

And not in commerce and government only but in race 
relationship, which is the hardest problem of all, the 
Church's principle is our only salvation. Race must 
be subordinated to humanity. The power of the crude 
results of Darwin's influence must be broken and we must 
reestablish Christ's. The end of humanity is not race 
w^arfare eliminating the weak. It is race fellowship per- 
fecting the family life of God upon the earth. In our 
new and consolidated world the present business of the 
Church is to supply humanity with its instrumentality 
of self-fulfillment. 

And yet how can the thing that needs to be redeemed 
be its own self fulfiller? This is the tragic problem of 
the new day. How^ can the new world that is to be 
hereafter be made out of the old breed of men? Saint 
Brice, caustically criticizing President Wilson's address 
before the Senate on January 24, 191 7, declared in 
the Paris Journal: "" The situation would appear in- 
extricable if we did not realize how the pursuit of a 
fixed idea may lead astray. Wilson is haunted by the 
idea of inaugurating the golden age of universal brother- 
hood. Naturally, general disarmament is the basis of this 



The Business of the Church 31 

system. The only thing lacking for the realization of 
this admirable conception is a new humanity. Does 
Wilson pretend to be able to change humanity?" Hu- 
man progress does not need to wait for the total perfec- 
tion of humanity. We have got rid of many evils even 
if humanity has not as yet been so greatly changed and 
we hope that we can get rid of war too with humanity 
as it is or as it is becoming. But Saint Brice's demand 
is just. Man himself is still the greatest element in 
his own problem. How is he to be made new? What 
agency but the Church knows where the power to effect 
the change can be found? We are back once more at 
the beginnings and the last word is the first. '^ Ye must 
be born again." What greater business could the Church 
have than to lead men to the one Source and Strength 
adequate both to generate the new life which they need 
and to provide that life with the forms of action through 
which it shall do its w^ork and bear its fruitage in the 
nation and throughout the world? 



Ill 



THE EFFECT OF THE WAR ON CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS 

AND IDEALS 

But has not the war produced an atmosphere in which 
the Church if it conceives its business in the terms just 
described, will be speaking without any audience? And 
are not the values which now appeal to men utterly 
diverse from all that the Church can offer? Not a bit 
of it. The experience of the war has clarified and con- 
firmed our fundamental religious ideas and revealed the 
power of their appeal to the present day mind. It has 
unmistakably set in the supreme place those moral and 
spiritual principles which constitute the message of the 
Church and it has revealed the responsiveness of men to 
the essential ethical ideals of Christianity. 

The war has not dissolved the great convictions of 
Christianity about God and man, about the Church and 
the Cross, about prayer and about Jesus Christ. 

It has disclosed the depth of our human belief in God. 
One met no atheists in the army and navy. The skep- 
ticism and materialistic doctrine of the last fifty years 
may have left deep moral scars upon the western world. 
It undoubtedly made the war possible. But it evidently 
affected only in the most superficial way the real instinct 
of men toward the idea of God. It vvas never necessary 
in the camps or in France to prove the existence of God. 

32 



The Effect of the War 33 

The enormous tide of life which was running swept men 
past the traditional intellectual difficulties and made the 
mechanistic chatter of the past generation seem meaning- 
less. Men knew God was awaiting just beyond the 
next moment. Or they had a rendezvous with him the 
day following or that day fortnight. What nonsense was 
this that there was no God? They knew better. They 
felt, confused as the idea might be, that they were en- 
gaged in His business and expected to report to Him 
soon. A Belgian chaplain told me that in the first year 
of the war the Belgian soldiers, free thinkers, Roman 
Catholics and men of no thought at all poured in their 
questions for help and strengthening and their ideas cen- 
tered on four great themes — God, sin, prayer, and nour- 
ishment, not for the body but for the soul. So among 
our own soldiers and sailors the outstanding fact has 
been an instinctive trust and assurance regarding God. 
And the war has not only revealed this widespread, almost 
universal, theistic attitude, it has strengthened it. It 
has done so by assuring men of a righteous moral govern- 
ment of the world. They have seen in the war the 
judgment of God striking home upon the third and fourth 
generation of Frederick the Great who pretended to 
believe in Him and who mocked the law of His righteous- 
ness. Sin has paid its penalty before their eyes, the sin 
of Germany, their own sin. There is God, they have 
said to themselves, and He is a just and almighty God. 
Furthermore the very sufferings of the war, its pain and 
agony, have helped many men in their faith in God. 
The suffering and pain of the universe have often been 
a difficulty in the way of a theistic belief. And the 
agony and blood of war have made it hard to reconcile 



34 The New Opportunity of the Church 

war with a divine government of the world. But why? 
Is there not anguish and blood in maternity? And yet 
maternity is the divinest and holiest thing we know in 
human life. It brings God nearest. St. Paul even made 
a bold declaration about it, which theologians have been 
busy ever since in explaining away, to the effect that 
it had a redeeming grace in it. Now men have experi- 
enced a sort of moral equivalent of the pain and peril 
of childbirth. So the soldier has found the suffering of 
war not a stumbling block in the way of a faith in God 
but a positive reassurance. *^ God is righteous and He 
suffers," the wounded man has said to himself, *' I am 
suffering and I have been ready to die for righteousness. 
I know a bit about God. I am sure He is there." The 
soldier knows the truth which Walt Whitman put in 
words : 

" And I say to Mankind, Be not anxious about God, 

For I who am curious aboat each am not curious about God. 
No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God 
and about Death.'* 

And this is not all. The soldier and sailor believed in 
God indeed. But also it is the God of the Bible they 
believed in, not the God of natural theology or the differ- 
ent God of the new theology. The war has influenced 
more than the soldier in this. It has been interesting 
to see the change that has passed over some of the liberal 
theological journals. Some of those which before the war 
could not tolerate a God of judgment and righteousness, 
but would allow only a God of such good nature that He 
could be trusted to pass over everything, are now sternest 
in their faith in a God "most just and terrible in His 



The Effect of the War 35 

Judgment; hating all sin and who will by no means clear 
the guilty." The war has restored and made clear and 
firm to multitudes of men, for a little season at least, 
the assurance of a just and good and real God. 

As to man, also, the war has confirmed the traditional 
doctrine of the Church. The Christian doctrine of man 
has quite openly and boldly asserted a paradox. It has 
denied that man holds by the beast. It has taught that 
he was a son of Grod, that God Himself took on his 
nature in the Incarnation, that he was made a little 
lower than the angels, that he was not of the order of 
nature alone but had kinships out of nature in God, that 
however sin and moral failure might have damaged him 
there were still indestructible possibilities and moral ca- 
pacities, which would respond to the call of God or to 
the summons of duty which is the Voice of God. Christi- 
anity flatly denied the materialistic theory as to the nature 
of man. On the other hand it unflinchingly recognized 
the facts of man's appalling gift for moral degradation. 
It knew and proclaimed the untruth of those transcen- 
dental exaggerations of the loftiness of human nature 
which still lingered among us and of all those rosy pictures 
of man's character which forget sin and the deadly realities 
of moral deficiency. Christianity, which began with the 
experience of the rejection by men of the highest and 
holiest character ever known and which saw in the cruci- 
fixion of Christ the limit to which human nature could 
sink in its self revelation of shame and cowardice, simply 
told man the truth about himself, that he was the son 
of a brute with a brute's possibilities latent in him. 
This double, self-contradictory view, constituted the tra- 
ditional anthropology of the Church. The war has sub- 



36 The New Opportunity of the Church 

stantiated it in every detail. It has revealed the divinity 
in man. The world itself, we may say, to borrow a 
phrase of St. John's, could not contain the books that 
might be written of the heroism, the unselfishness, the 
modesty, the good cheer, the love, the sacrifice, the loy- 
alty, the devotion, the honor, the kindness, the forgiveness, 
the courage, the tenacity, the justice, the goodness, the 
true Godlikeness which have been displayed by soldiers, 
sailors, civilians, fathers, mothers, wives, boys and girls, 
young and old. "' When I think of this war and of the 
hell which men are making of the world," said a woman 
at the beginning of the struggle, " I wish I were a dog." 
" Was there ever a more glorious day," said a man who 
heard of her remark. '^ I am proud to be alive now. 
Why, you can get a man to die for anything." Man- 
kind has shown itself to be capable of any task or sacri- 
fice however great. Out of the lowest, leadenest lives 
the golden and shining deeds have come. The trans- 
forming influences of duty, of a comrade's call for help, 
of hardship without resting, of dogged persistence in a 
cause seen to be God's cause and worth life and death, 
have worked in hundreds of thousands of men the miracle 
of glorified character, of character glorified at least in 
the moment and article of utter loyalty, derisive of all 
melodrama, simply and stodgily doing what had to be 
done and what was right, that God's truth might not be 
trampled down. The war has shown what a glorious 
work God did in making man. But it has shown too 
what a beastly, degraded, unspeakable thing man can 
be. War itself in its reality, not in its idealization, is 
of the dirt. It requires dirt life. '' Yes," said an 
experienced Belgian soldier, ^' there are glories of war 



The Effect of the War 37 

but war is blackness. The glories are like a few stars 
shining in dark night and the dark night is war." War 
has shown the soldier's responsiveness and his irresponsi- 
bility, his willingness to give up everything and his easy 
subsidence into the idea that everything must be given 
to him, his tenacity and his vacillation, his self control 
and his self indulgence, his good nature and his ingrati- 
tude, his discipline and his disloyalty, his thrift and his 
wastefulness, his nobility and his bestiality. The atroci- 
ties and crimes which have been perpetrated have shown 
what man will do to make war frightful and to prove that 
man is not a son of God but a son of the devil. But 
apart from these evidences of man's depravity we see 
against the background of honor and light among our own 
people, soldier and civilian, those who have gone and those 
who have stayed, the shadows of weakness and reaction 
and failure. The war has reaffirmed the Christian view 
of the anomaly of the dignity and depravity of man. 

But has not the war once for all discredited the Church ? 
We have been told that it has, that it has won for the 
Y. M. C. A. and the Y. W. C. A. and the K. of C. 
and the Salvation Army a place of undying aifection and 
gratitude in the mind of the soldier, but that the absence 
of the Church as such and of its direct representatives 
from the camps and from the army and the recollection 
among the soldiers of the sectarianism and dead tradition- 
alism, the negative morality and the religious selfishness 
and want of democracy in the home churches contrasted 
with the unity and vitality and unselfishness and brother- 
hood of the army, have bred in the soldier a disgust with 
the Church from which it will suffer for many a day. 
All this and a great deal more we have heard over and 



38 The New Opportunity of the Church 

over again from all sorts of people and in all sorts of 
places, troop-ships and troop-trains, hospitals, pulpits and 
magazine articles. But the facts, what are the facts? 
I venture to say in the teeth of all this that the Church 
and its ministry came out of the war with more of the 
respect and affection of the soldier and the sailor than 
any auxiliary agency, however useful and efficient it has 
been. A great deal of criticism has fallen upon some 
of those agencies, but not more than the soldiers and 
sailors have poured out on the army and navy them- 
selves. Some of it has no doubt been warranted: most 
of it wholly unjust. It will soon pass over and the 
good and faithful service rendered will be forever remem- 
bered. But the Church has not been dishonored by their 
usefulness. They have avowed their right relations to 
the churches and have acknowledged that all their service 
was in the name of the Church. It was the Christian 
Church which accomplished whatever good was done and 
as they reflect upon it soldiers and sailors will see this. 
And the Church was there in army and navy not only in 
all forms of auxiliary service but also in the 3,000 chap- 
lains, including the pick of the younger men in the min- 
istry and the priesthood. Hundreds of these men won 
the eternal love and admiration of those they served, and 
represented to them the noblest ideals of character and 
comradeship. Whether the soldier has learned to abhor 
sectarianism, selfishness, negative morality, and the want 
of democracy in the Church will remain to be seen. Let 
us pray that he has. If he has it will be to the vast advan- 
tage of the Church. For there is scarcely one American 
community where there is not more factionalism in poli- 
tics, in racial and national sentiment and in society than 



The Effect of the War 39 

there is in any church in the community or between all 
the churches of the community, where there is not more 
selfishness in business and in social life than there is in 
theology and religion, where the churches do not repre- 
sent more ethical positiveness than the courts, the local 
philanthropies and especially the modern agencies of social 
service, and where the ordinary Christian congregation 
does not represent a meeting place of more classes and 
social groups than are brought together in any other 
association of the community and of far more democracy 
than characterizes ordinary personal or neighborhood re- 
lationships. All impulses such as these in men's hearts 
to-day are helpful, not hurtful to the Church and to the 
churches, even as they are, with all their shortcomings. 
But in deeper ways than these the war has confirmed 
the doctrine and ideal of the Christian Church, has re- 
vealed the strength of its appeal to men's hearts and has 
prepared the way for a more effective approach on the 
part of the Church to the men as they return home. The 
word ** Church " is a word used in many meanings. I 
am speaking of it now as a mystical body, visible in partial 
and defective forms, representing as in a human body unity 
of life rather than uniformity of function, and embodying 
in the richest and subtlest ways of which we can conceive 
the social, collective principle. The war has shown the 
reality of forces in which the mechanistic interpretation 
of life has disbelieved and which may be partially de- 
scribed but cannot be accounted for by genetic psychology. 
It has demonstrated the reality of the unity of the life 
spirit, its immense momentum, the power of corporate 
interests and sentiments to pick up individuals and endue 
them with the energies and ideals of the body. There 



40 The New Opportunity of the Church 

has been something mystical and infinitely hopeful in the 
evidence of the truth of social character, social purpose, 
social consecration. Society has furnished multitudes of 
men with spiritual conceptions and ethical impulse of 
which they had been individually w^holly incapable. The 
army picked up the weakling, the helpless, the incompetent 
and again and again by the sheer upholding force of the 
mass bore these men along on a tide of service and achieve- 
ment possible only to a corporate and communized devo- 
tion. We have seen in military and political life proof 
of the reality, and faint illustration of the measure, of 
the truth of the New Testament idea of the Church as 
the body of Christ, in which the life of the body controls 
and feeds and uses all the members. What we felt after 
in the war under the necessity and compulsion of national 
unity the Church of Christ was established to interpret 
and to provide. Men have experienced now its possi- 
bility and have seen what any small measure of its pos- 
session may do for the nation and for mankind. 

And still further the war ought to have dispelled com- 
pletely the foolish idea that historic and sacramental 
religion is an anachronism, to be displaced by pragmatic 
or purely ethical religious conceptions. The religion 
which appealed to men was a religion of full loyalty to 
the actual person, Jesus Christ, which could speak an 
authentic word about Him, which could say, ** I know 
Him. Let me introduce you to Him.'' And it was the 
Churches which could feed men upon Him in the sacra- 
ment, and nerve them by the power of the sense of His 
communicated life, to which men came with hunger and 
respect. In the British army there were regiments that 
would not go into battle without their chaplains or until 



The Effect of the War 41 

they had been led to the Lord's Supper. Among our 
American troops the Communion Service filled an ever 
enlarging place. A friend who w^as serving at Camp 
Merritt, the embarkation camp at Tenafly, N. J., told 
me that one night he had gone to bed w^eary at mid- 
night. About one o'clock he w^as awakened by the open- 
ing of his door and the shining of a light on his face. He 
opened his eyes and saw an officer standing in the door- 
w^ay. '* I am sorry to trouble you," said he, "but the 
men are leaving to-night and they do not want to go 
without a prayer. Would you come out to them? " It 
was customary for the troops to be sent out during the 
night to the trains or to the lighters which took them to 
the transports at Hoboken. My friend rose at once to 
go out to the men for a last prayer before they started 
overseas. The officer waited for them. As he came out 
of the door the officer said, " If it could be, sir, they would 
like the sacrament too." My friend took his chalice and 
a package of wafers which he felt sure would suffice 
and went out into the night. The moon was shining and 
the men were standing in the company street with their 
packs beside them. He spoke a few words and offered 
prayer and then invited those who wished to partake to 
pass by and as they passed he dipped the wafers in the 
wine and served them one by one. Soon he realized that 
his supply would run short and he broke the wafers in 
halves and then in quarters and then as the men still came 
could only touch the wine to their lips. They were not 
all church members. Probably only a few of them were. 
There may have been elements of superstition in their 
desire. But there was reahty. And when the last man 
had come they stood for a moment of silence and then 



42 The New Opportunity of the Church 

passed on into the night and across the sea to France 
and to death and to the life that is beyond death where One 
drinks wine new with men in the Kingdom of His Father. 
Incidents like these happened by the score. Men wanted 
the nourishment of the body and blood of Christ. The 
idea of it was no fanciful idea to them. The sacramental 
service of the Church gained a new recognition and a 
grateful acceptance amid the horrors and night of the war. 
But the symbol of Christianity which the war made 
most conspicuous was the Cross of Christ. Three of the 
great principles which are embodied in the Cross were 
dominant principles in the war, the principle of abandon- 
ment, of the letting go of all agencies and tasks but life, 
of achievement by life and by the power of the spirit; 
the principle of freedom, of contempt for all accouter- 
ment and acquisition; and the principle of atonement, of 
the work of unity by means of surrender, of the use of 
death to end death, (a) The Cross represented the 
principle of abandonment. *' When He had by Himself 
purged our sins," says the writer of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, ** He sat down on the right hand of the Maj- 
esty on high." The later texts reject the words '^ by 
Himself " as a gloss, but the idea is there none the less 
in the mood of the verb. He did it by Himself, not by 
anything outside of Himself. He used His life for it. 
That was the central lesson of the war. We have read 
all over the nation the challenging signs, ** Food will win 
the war." ** Ships will win the war." ** Bonds will win 
the war." But while the war would not have been won 
without bonds and ships and food, they did not win it. 
Why were they needed at all? In the interest of men. 
Bonds were needed to equip them, ships to transport 



The Effect of the War 43 

them, food to sustain them. But it took life, not the 
weapons or agencies of life, to achieve victory. The war 
has shown, as Paul taught, that we are saved by His 
life, poured out on the cross, poured out now through 
men. (b) The Cross represented the principle of free- 
dom. Jesus Christ moved on an orbit of liberty. Neither 
property nor tradition nor conventions ever bound Him. 
He and His disciples lived an unencumbered life. He 
was no foe of private property. He believed in it and 
sanctioned it. But He never allowed Himself to be 
enslaved to it. It was for use not for impediment. 
When He died the only loot for His murderers was 
the one robe that He wore. One secret of the soldier's 
joy and fellowship lay in this freedom from the trammels 
of possessions which need to be guarded and which deflect 
action. In the war and for the nation's life all things 
were held common and valueless except as they were 
ministers to life and to human ends, (c) The Cross 
represented the principle of Atonement. Christ suffered 
that men might not suffer. He met the anguish of separa- 
tion that man might be delivered from it. " In my 
thinking," writes a thoughtful Christian lawyer, ** I have 
felt that perhaps the most succinct statement in reply to 
the suggestion that it is inconsistent for those who are 
opposed to war as itself an evil, yet not only to submit to 
the war, but enthusiastically to support it, is to point out 
that a war to end war is no more anomalous than is the 
death of the Lord Jesus Christ to end death. The whole 
scheme, as I interpret it, of our Christian faith, implies 
that. The sending of the Son of God to earth was, in 
the purpose of the Father, to make him a Saviour and 
Lord; to destroy the enemies of man, sin and death; in 



44 The New Opportunity of the Church 

the accomplishment of that purpose, He who knew no sin 
was made sin for us, and He who was the conqueror of 
death died for us. If this war is really waged as a 
righteous war, it has in it all the elements, not of a 
crusade to recover an empty tomb, but of a sacrifice unto 
death to break the bonds of human enslavement, and with 
a new meaning we can sing the old stanza of the Battle 
Hymn of the Republic: 

" * In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, 
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: 
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free! ' '* 

Men who could not put this in words felt it. They 
knew that it was right and reasonable to die to diminish 
death, to suffer pain that there might be less pain to 
suffer, to accept the contradiction and separation of the 
grave for the sake of the affirmation and unity of life. 
Deeper and more religious meanings than we have ever 
proclaimed are discerned in the Cross of Christ, revealed 
and illustrated in the war. 

Prayer is another of the Christian realities which has 
been unquestioningly accepted. All the theoretical objec- 
tions to prayer which have grown out of modern inter- 
pretations of the universe were simply ignored. No one 
needed to advance an apologetic for prayer. Men just 
prayed. It did not matter whether they had ever prayed 
before or not. They did it now. They did it in thou- 
sands of homes from which the sons had gone out to battle. 
They did it in the aviation bases before the men went out 
to peril in the air. They did it on the war ships and 
the transports and the submarines. They did it in the 
camps at home. The lads who had known how were 



The Effect of the War 45 

sometimes diffident about beginning but the diffidence dis- 
appeared and men who had not known how came under 
a contagion of prayer which was new to them and which 
with many seemed so natural as, in the moments of su- 
preme danger at least, to become irresistible. Henry B. 
Wright who has done a piece of work at Camp Devens 
whose results will be enduring, early in the war had the 
following experience: ** Two recruits came to him one 
night with the request that he give them a little advice. 

* You see,' said one of them, * we don't exactly know 
what to do about praying. Both of us have been in the 
habit of saying a short prayer at home every night before 
we got into bed, but since we came to camp we've cut 
out the kneeling and said them after we were safely 
between the blankets. Do you think this is all right, or 
ought we to kneel, as we always have done since we were 
boys, regardless of what the other fellows may say or 
think ? ' Professor Wright hesitated a moment, realizing 
that the situation might be a delicate one. He didn't 
exactly like to advise them to kneel and perhaps call 
down the ridicule of the entire barracks upon what might 
easily seem to some to be a flaunting of their religion, 
but on the other hand he admits that he was anxious 
to learn what the result of such a course would be. 

* That's really a personal problem for you to settle for 
yourselves,' he finally replied, ' but it would certainly do 
no great harm to try kneeling once, and see what happens. 
If the result is satisfactory you can keep it up. If it 
isn't, why go back to saying your prayers after you have 
gone to bed.' The young men thanked him and departed. 
A few days later he ran into one of them on the street. 

* Well, how did you come out ? ' was his first query. 



46 The New Opportunity of the Church 

* What happened when you knelt the other night ? ' 

* Nothing at all — nobody made a sound/ said the sol- 
dier, * only last night three other men knelt when we 
did.' * And/ said Professor Wright, in ending the story, 

* if you will believe it, at the present moment in that one 
barracks, where 167 men sleep, every one with the 
exception of about a dozen kneel regularly at night and 
say their prayers/ " 

And at the front, prayer was as natural to men as 
danger. " O God, give me courage. Don't let me flinch. 
Go with me now. Help me, O God, help me. Don't 
let me get killed if it can be so. I wish I were home 
but I am glad I am here. I want to do my duty. Help 
me to do it. Bring me back safe. But help me to do my 
part. And if this is my end, don't let me drop. Save me, 
O God, and keep me. Here goes." How many thousands 
made such prayers in those last moments and then when 
the shock had been met and they were going on, or lying 
still waiting for help to come, men who had never thought 
greatly of God in peace, felt that He was there and 
prayed for the power that could not be stopped or for the 
patience that could bear all pain and wait. It is quite 
true that the instinct that prays in danger often dies down 
in security. But even so it has borne its testimony. The 
man has believed and there can be no disavowal of his 
belief. 

Above all, the war has illumined and glorified the 
figure of Christ. A good many persons and institutions 
and ideas have been discredited by the war. Philosophies 
which jauntily assumed that they had conquered the world 
are a laughing stock now. But Christ towers alike over 
all the wreckage and all the glory of the war. Some 



The Effect of the War 47 

soldiers thought they saw Him on the battlefield. Others 
know that they saw Him in the hospital. The one prob- 
lem which thousands of them regarded as the fundamen- 
tal problem and which had to be answered for them was, 
"Would Christ approve of this war?^' And the death- 
less determination which came to them arose from the 
conviction that Christ did approve. They came to see 
clearly, also, that until Christ is made the real master 
of human life there can be no assurance that it will not 
have to be done all over again. Christ's friendliness, 
His superiority to race prejudice. His unselfishness, His 
righteousness, His forgiveness, His truth, His principles 
of a new and different human order, they realized, are 
the only hope of the new world. Men have discovered 
also that something more is necessary than pronunciamen- 
toes, programs of Utopia. The world needs a Saviour, 
a Redeemer, a Master, a Person who is new life to men 
and nations, who can say the words, and do the deeds 
which only Christ can say and do. Mr. E. S. Martin 
who has written with wisdom and earnestness throughout 
the war bore testimony to the truth in his Christmas edi- 
torial in Life: 

" If you ask who was the greatest mind that humanity has 
produced, most people hereabouts, after considering whether 
it was Napoleon or Caesar or Lincoln or some one else, will 
assent if you suggest to them that it was Christ. For us of 
European descent, at least, Christ is the great mind that is 
the basis of the civilization that we live in and practice to 
improve. The life and teachings of Christ conferred new 
importance on the individual, and in that way they are the 
foundation of modern democracy. Christ saw in every man 
the expectation, or at least the possibility, of immortality, and 
a chance to attain to fitness for it. To Christ no one was 



48 The New Opportunity of the Church 

unimportant. Rich or poor, slave or free, every man had in 
him the germ of immortality and the making of a saint, if 
only the spirit of him could be caught and inspired. What 
wisdom, what manner of conduct, what aspirations would 
be the fruit of such inspiration, Christ showed by His own life. 

" Now wars, of course, do not make people Christlike by 
wholesale. They do diffuse very widely a certain sort of con- 
secration. They do withdraw people from selfish concentra- 
tion on their own prosperity and comfort and make them 
spend themselves and all they have for a common object. 
This war we have had part in has done that to a wonderful 
degree. It has drawn together antagonistic persons and peoples 
and set them to work in a common cause. It has gone won- 
derfully far to abolish selfishness for the time being, and that 
has been a Christian result. 

" But what we may reasonably expect of wars is not so much 
the immediate Christianization of individuals, as the bring- 
ing of world politics into better accord with the Great Mind, 
so that the kind may have a better chance to enjoy the natural 
fruits of goodness, and the greedy may be hindered from 
harrying them. When a war has increased and extended the 
authority of the Golden Rule, that war is a success. . . . 

" Extraordinary, most extraordinary, are the changes that 
have been accomplished by this war. Even men have been 
changed to a remarkable degree. Many have been persuaded 
to new views, and millions have been convinced against their 
will by weapons that they devised to convince others." 

The war has swept away a great deal. With the storm 
have gone some of the fogs with which men had hid them- 
selves from the authority and the necessity of Christ. 

I venture to say again, accordingly, what was said at 
the outset of this chapter, that the war has clarified and 
confirmed our fundamental religious ideas and revealed 
the power of their appeal to the present day mind. The 
war also has unmistakably set in the supreme place those 
moral and spiritual principles which constitute the message 



The Efect of the War 49 

of the Church. It has revealed the responsiveness of 
men to the essential ethical ideals of Christianity. Chris- 
tianity proclaims that moral and spiritual values are ab- 
solute and dominant. Much of our modern teaching de- 
nied this. The w^ar has affirmed it. It has shown that 
these values are supreme over personal loss and material 
interest. Fathers and mothers have given up their only 
sons to die for a cause. Soldiers have served in the vi^ar 
for pay so small as to be negligible. Thousands of men 
have served for nothing. More than that, they have made 
untold sacrifices. In the case of Belgium we have seen 
a nation give up its material interests utterly and lay the 
very body of its national existence upon the altar. For 
four years it was a national soul without a body or a 
home. The war itself in its essence was a moral not a 
material struggle and it was moral ideas which prevailed. 
The very materialism of the struggle was marked by the 
idealism of self denial. It avowed itself as nothing but 
the vehicle and weapon of a righteous purpose and a 
human hope. What is idealism but the belief in the pos- 
sibility of the best, a confidence in the good faith of all 
who love liberty and are ready to die for it, the brotherly 
trust of the democratic principle? We succeeded in the 
war whenever and wherever this was our spirit and else- 
where and alwaj^s we failed and will fail. The war says 
that what Christ said is forever true. 

The common axiom and assumption of war is the Chris- 
tian principle that life is not the great value, neither the 
lives of others nor our own. ** Thou shalt not kill '' is 
not the whole law and it does not forbid all killing. 
The very code in which the law is found prescribes cap- 
ital punishment and sets many moral values over human 



50 The New Opportunity of the Church 

life. It may even be a good thing for some men to be 
killed. Jesus said it was profitable for a man who was 
about to offend a little one that he should be drowned 
first. On Jesus' authority one may believe that it is a 
kindness to a villain about to rape a child to kill him be- 
fore he does the deed of desecration and shame, if he 
cannot be otherwise deterred. And it was better for 
Germany to have her soldiers slaughtered in the effort 
to usurp criminal dominion over the world than to have 
spared their lives and allowed her to succeed. Nor is life 
the first value to its owners. The commercial theory was 
fast teaching us that it was, that men and nations alike 
were free to sacrifice anything else rather than their own 
lives. The war preached the contrary Christian doc- 
trine, that life is only a means, not an end, that men have 
a right to lay it down. The scorn of the crude, familiar 
lines written long before the war is an accepted scorn to- 
day. 

"A man must live! We justify 
Low shift and trick to treason high, 
A little vote for a little gold, 
To a whole senate bought and sold, 
With this self-evident reply. 

"But is it so? Pray tell me why 
Life at such cost you have to buy? 
, In what religion were you told 

* A man must live *? 

" There are times when a man must die, 
Imagine for a battle-cry 

From soldiers with a sword to hold — 
From soldiers with the flag unrolled — 
* A man must live.' '' 



The Effect of the War 51 

Life IS not the great value. Truth and loyalty are 
above life. The correct estimate of the value and use of 
life which prevailed in the war ought now permanently 
to stiffen our resistance to the old sophistries which justi- 
fied lies to save life and to clear the atmosphere for the 
doctrine and demand of Christianity which is a doctrine 
of pure veracity and a demand for the absolute devotion 
of life to enduring sacrificial service. The loyalty of 
peace also ought to inherit now the loyalty awakened and 
offered in war. Loyalty like truth is above life. There 
are times when men have truly felt that even loyalty 
to loyalty, though the object to which that loyalty was 
attached w^as unreal to it, was worth more than life. 
Sir Alfred LyalFs poem, '' Theology in Extremis '' is the 
tale of such a loyalty. An Englishman taken prisoner in 
the Indian Mutiny is offered life if he will abjure Chris- 
tianity. He does not believe in Christianity and he has 
no religious faith for which to die. A word which he 
can easily speak will set him free. 

" Only a formula easy to patter, 
And, God Almighty, what can it matter ? " 

The memories of home come back to him — 

" Showing me summer in western land 

Now, as the cool breeze murmureth 
In leaf and flower — And here I stand 

In this plain all bare save the shadow of death; 
Leaving my life in its full noonday. 
And no one to know why I flung it away. 

"Why? Am I bidding for glory's roll? 
I shall be murdered and clean forgot; 
Is it a bargain to save my soul ? 

God, whom I trust in, bargains not; 



52 The New Opportunity of the Church 

Yet for the honor of English race, 
May I not live or endure disgrace. 

"Ay, but the word, if I could have said it, 
I by no terrors of hell perplext; 
Hard to be silent and have no credit 

From man in this world, or reward in the next; 
None to bear witness and reckon the cost 
Of the name that is saved by the life that is lost. 

"I must be gone to the crowd untold 

Of men by the cause which they served unknown, 

Who moulder in myriad graves of old; 
Never a story and never a stone 

Tells of the martyrs who died like me 

Just for the pride of the old countree." 

If for this, how much more for the pride and the love 
which include this? " How much more? Unlimitedly,*' 
answers the war. *' Life is the working stufE of God. 
Men's blood is the stream of power for His purpose.'* 

And in this also there is fresh support for the col- 
lective obligation which Christ in His Church lays on 
men. The war declared the primacy of the corporate 
claim of society over the right of individual personality. 
The constraint of the body is upon the members. What 
gives the flag its power is its symbolization of this col- 
lective life and its claim. The sacredness of the indi- 
vidual conscience is a holy thing but not more so than 
the sacredness of the corporate life. Human good has a 
right to ask for all that the individual has. If it can 
demand his life, it can demand aught else. It is recog- 
nized that he can refuse it and no unjust penalty must 
be laid upon him if he does. Life itself will judge him 
and he will know the full mercy and the full righteous- 



The Effect of the War 53 

ness of God. If he is right against society's false claim 
upon him, life and God will justify him and by his pain, 
if need be by his death, he will have forwarded the prog- 
ress of mankind even against its unseeing will. 

The central act of Christianity was the accepted and 
unavoided death of Christ. He had a right to lay down 
His life. But, more than that, He conceived His right 
to be His duty. The duty of a man to die for his nation 
saves the principle of the supremacy of collective obliga- 
tion and interest from any endangerment of the right of 
the individual person. The good man like the Good 
Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, whatever the 
manner or occasion of the dying. We have seen the 
glory and joy of the happy acceptance of this duty. The 
war has revealed it and even more vividly it has been 
revealed in those accessory services which have glorified 
both the center and the outskirts of the great conflict. 
There has been no more shining instance than the life 
and death of William A. Shedd in Western Persia. Dr. 
Shedd was the senior member of the mission station of 
Urumia. From the beginning of the war its horrors 
fell nowhere more darkly and fatally than upon the 
Christian population of northwestern Persia. They were 
driven first northward toward Russia and then southward 
into Mesopotamia. They were shut up in Urumia City 
in crowded mission compounds. Their villages were 
destroyed, their property pillaged and their daughters 
ravished. One can hardly wonder that when power 
came to them there were unwise and unjust retaliations. 
Here and in other Persian cities the typhus and typhoid 
cut down the missionaries remorselessly as they cared 
for the persecuted and famine stricken people. They were 



54 The New Opportunity of the Church 

free to come away and save their lives and they stayed 
and laid them down. Dr. Shedd had been called on by 
the American Government to act as vice-consul and for 
months had been the one center of order and justice, 
restraining wrong doing, whether by Moslem or by 
Christian, relieving suffering, and seeking to secure the 
maintenance of at least some form of nominal govern- 
ment. At last panic-stricken, against his persuasions and 
appeal, 60,000 Assyrian and Armenian Christians set 
off in a great flight from Urumia to the south. Unable 
to deter them Dr. Shedd resolved to accompany them 
as a rearguard of protection against pursuing Turks and 
Kurds. They fled without food or transportation over 
consecutive ranges of mountains, through a barren coun- 
try without grain or fuel or roads, leaving a trail of 
death and disease behind them. Those who came last 
died by thousands. Dr. Shedd like a faithful shepherd 
followed his flock to shield and protect it and at Sain 
Kala, a little village, south of the Urumia Lake, he fell a 
victim to cholera. It had been open to him and his asso- 
ciates at any time to leave Persia and seek safety, but like 
his Master, he could save others but he could not save 
himself. One may justly adapt to him such words as 
Matthew Arnold used of his father in '' Rugby Chapel ": 

"But thou would'st not alone 
Be saved, our brother, alone 
Conquer and come to thy goal, 
Leaving the rest in the wild. 
They were weary, and they 
Fearful, and they in their march 
Fain to drop down and to die. 
Still thou turnedst, and still 
Gavest the weary thy hand. 



The Effect of the War 55 

" If, in the paths of the world, 
Stones might have wounded thy feet, 
Toil or dejection have tried 
Thy spirit, of that they saw 
Nothing — to them thou wast still 
Cheerful, and helpful, and firm! 
Therefore to thee it was given 
Many to save with thyself; 
And, at the end of the day, 
O faithful shepherd! to come, 
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand." 

There are still other lines in Arnold's tribute to his 
father, which might justly be applied to William Shedd, 
true missionary, lover of Christ and of men, good shep- 
herd like his Lord. One of the Syrian people, Professor 
Yohanan of Columbia University, w^ho knew and loved 
him, has himself used just such speech of him and of his 
father: *' Dr. Shedd,'* says he, "was a scholar, and 
thoroughly equipped for the work with something more 
than the surface-teaching of the ordinary theological doc- 
trines. His book, ' Islam and the Oriental Churches,' is 
an able piece of work. He laid, however, his literary 
ambition and all his scientific attainments upon the altar 
of God from whom they came, counting them loss for 
Christ. . . . He did not work for stipend, or honor, or 
the praise of men, but was impelled by higher motives 
to the service of his Master. He was the champion of 
the oppressed, the shepherd of a gentle and humble spirit, 
to whom the poorest of his flock was not too poor. His 
greatest joy was in bringing a stray sheep into the fold." 

The end came to him on August 7, 191 8, among the 
mountains of Persian Kurdistan. Mrs. Shedd has writ- 
ten from Hamadan an epic letter of the closing days: 



^6 The New Opportunity of the Church 

" The roads were crowded with nearly every kind of animal 
that walks and thousands of vehicles. We estimated that 
there were about 70,000 Christians in Urumia, or perhaps 
more, but some stayed with Moslem friends, and some did 
not get warning. We pushed on rapidly and got along fairly 
well until the third day when about an hour from Memetabad, 
in Sulduz, a man came up and told us that the Turks had 
reached Heydarabad an hour or two behind us. We had been 
hearing firing but could not locate it. It seemed as if our last 
hope had vanished and there was nothing but massacre for 
the thousands of frightened people. We whipped up our tired 
horses to try and reach Memetyar hoping that Dr. Shedd could 
find the prominent men there and get them to intercede for 
the people. Great crowds were encamped there. The report 
was false. The Turks were not behind us yet, but there had 
been an attack at Heydarabad and the people left there and 
ran off leaving their loads and their money. But we did not 
dare to stay at Memetyar over night and hastened on. Later, 
those coming after us were fired upon by cannon on that road, 
and again they ran off leaving their loads which was evidently 
what the attackers wanted. 

"On the fifth day we reached Mianduab, distress increasing 
day by day. The Van Armenians with most of the mountain 
tribes, including nearly all the fighters, were ahead, so that 
those of us in the rear were almost unprotected. On the fifth 
day we heard that the English were really at Sain Kala so 
we took heart and camped that night in a garden with a few 
others at Kara Waran. The next morning we took our time 
thinking that since the English were near we would be safe. 
About six o'clock firing began. It was evident we were being 
attacked from the rear. Dr. Shedd jumped on a horse and 
tried to rally the few gun men left. We found that nearly every- 
body had moved on and we were in the extreme rear. 

" With great difficulty we got our wagons through the narrow 
streets of the village and on to the main road by a short cut 
for the firing was going on behind us and we did not dare 
to go around. Then fighting began on our front and from the 
right. After some driving we found ourselves at the tail end 
of the crowd which was jammed in between two walls where 



The Effect of the War 57 

we had to stay for some time. The fighting in the rear was 
stopped and I was greatly relieved to have Dr. Shedd appear. 
One of our attacks was from the Majd i Saltana who had 
small cannon. Our leader claimed to have taken one and 
showed us the shell. The attacks were repulsed sufficiently to 
allow the crowd to move forward, but the fighting kept up 
three or four hours as we traveled on. We ourselves were 
not in the place where the bullets were thickest. We saw 
several dead bodies, mostl)' women. 

*' Again in the afternoon we were attacked, but one of the 
Syrian leaders with his men who had been sent back reached 
us in time, and he soon got possession of the mountain ridges 
and protected the long line of refugees. This time too, Dr. Shedd 
got on a horse and tried to rally the men with guns to protect 
the crowds so that by night he was very tired. 

" That night we stopped at a threshing floor a few hours 
from Sain Kala, and made an early start reaching the English 
camp at Sain Kala about 9 A. m. August 6th. Thousands and 
'thousands, perhaps fifty thousand (I can't say) refugees were 
camped about Sain Kala, in the orchards, yards of houses, and 
spread out over the surrounding hills. And still the long line 
of stragglers reached back for miles. 

" From Urumia to Sain Kala, six days' journey for us, I saw 
perhaps not more than 20 bodies of Moslems lying along the 
road, evidently shot by the Armenians or Mountain Syrians 
who were leading the flight. At nearly every village we had 
the same complaint of plunder and murder by those in advance, 
so those of us in the rear suffered the penalty. Villages nearly 
everywhere were deserted. We could buy nothing and were 
always in danger of attack. 

" When we reached the English camp at Sain Kala, August 
6th, we were received by Major Moore and Captain Reed, the 
latter for many years connected with the English Mission in 
Urumia. They had been sent with ammunition, Lewis guns, 
money and a handful of men, to save the Urumia situation, 
but came * too late, too late.' Dr. Shedd had longed for months 
to be able to shift some of his heavy responsibilities and he 
was wonderfully cheered when we reached Sain Kala, thinking 
now that the people would be safe and there would be some 



58 The New Opporiunity of the Church 

authority that could maintain order. Ever since the middle 
of February he had been giving himself without reserve, try- 
ing to save life and property in the midst of anarchy, but 
that is a long story. We had hardly been in camp at Sain 
Kala an hour before all hopes of rest vanished. 

"A small force of Englishmen sent out about i6 or i8 miles 
to protect refugees in the rear had been attacked by a larger 
force. Immediately the camp was astir, and a body of cavalry 
was sent out. There were only about 150 fighting men in the 
English detachment at Sain Kala, but they had rapid firing 
guns which saved them more than once. They tried to get 
Syrian and Armenian leaders to get their men out but it was 
very difficult as they were with their families and a terrible 
panic had begun. The thousands camped around us started 
to move forward slowly, irresistibly, like a great avalanche. 
Some armed men were sent back to the town of Mahmudjik 
to rescue the people there and help the struggling rear of 
the line of refugees which had been cut off. I am told that 
quite a number on both sides were killed in Mahmudjik, the 
Moslems attacking from roofs and windows. They had great 
provocations for as usual they had been robbed, but the attack 
was repulsed, all the refugees moved forward and by evening 
only the English camp remained. 

" An hour or so after reaching camp I noticed that Dr. Shedd 
did not look well. Soon he complained of the great heat in 
the tent. I told him I would fix him a place to lie down in 
our Red Cross cart which had a canvas cover, where it was 
cooler. After a time I saw he was very weak and miserable so 
I had the baggage taken out and arranged a bed for him with 
quilt and pillows on the floor of the cart. The English doctor 
was out with the cavalry. Dr. Jesse Yonan was there but had 
no medicine. I feared cholera and suggested calomel which 
I had. We gave him several doses of that. 

** About four or five o'clock Captain Reed told me they were 
going to move their camp to a place under the shelter of the 
mountains. I made arrangements for our baggage and we 
started before dark so that we could see the road and Dr. 
Shedd would not be jolted so much. The three or four Syrians 
besides our two drivers were with us and I thought they under- 



The Effect of the War 59 

stood perfectly well that we wanted to stop at the English 
camp where we would see the English doctor. It soon grew 
dark and I was entirely absorbed in my care for Dr. Shedd and 
did not watch the road. After what seemed like hours, I 
noticed that the riders behind were leaving us, and I called 
out and asked if we were not near the English camp. They 
replied we had left it several miles behind. I cannot tell you 
my feelings; the roads were too rou^h and uncertain to return. 
We got into a gully and could not go on. It was very dark. 

" We called to the riders who were leaving us to come 
back and help us back the cart up to the level, but they went 
on. However, the men who were with us succeeded in backing 
the cart up to a level place where we decided to stay until 
morning. Then we were alone on that desolate mountain road 
in the darkness with my husband dying and no medicine, no 
nourishment, no comfortable place for him to lie, and only a 
limited supply of water. I lighted the lantern and looked at 
his face, saw he was very bad and told the men some one 
must go back for the English doctor. Two of them went, but 
the doctor did not reach us until midnight. There was an 
old cart left by the roadside and the men set fire to it to have 
heat and light. The lantern had only a few drops of oil so 
we could not keep it lighted. I had some coffee which the 
men made and Dr. Shedd drank it eagerly. He was very weak 
but we had no nourishment to give him. From the first he 
had severe cramps in his legs and was very cold. I heated 
the water bottle for his feet. The doctor came and suggested 
ptomaine poison and left us saying we should wait till they 
came up in the morning. Dr. Shedd was not conscious after 
that. A little after light the man said we could not wait 
there as there was firing behind and the English were probably 
attacked, so we took him in his dying hour over those rough 
mountain roads, two hours or more, when Captain Reed and 
the doctor caught up with us. We drove the cart to the side 
of the road. The doctor pronounced it cholera and at my re- 
quest gave him a small injection for I still hoped that God. 
might let him stay. In a few minutes he breathed his last 
about 10 A.M., August 7th, just one week after leaving Urumia. 
Captain Reed said we had better go on as far as the carts 



6o The New Opportunity of the Church 

could go and find a burial place. We went on for an hour 
or so and found a place on the mountain side near a rock. 
There was nothing to dig with but a small adz. But with the 
aid of fingers and sticks they made a shallow grave quite 
a distance above the road. We sewed him in a blanket and 
then wrapped him in a heavy canvas from the cart and bound 
it with ropes. Dr. Yonan read a part of i Corinthians xv 
and led in prayer. After a layer of earth we placed stones 
and again on the top and then smoothed it over so that no 
enemy might know where the grave was. We cut a cross 
on the top of the rock and on the front, and Captain Reed 
had a drawing made of the place so that it can be found. It 
is about six or seven miles west of Sain Kala. It was terrible 
to leave him there in that wild desolate place but I hope to 
take him to Seir some time." 

This is what life is given for, that men may lay it 
down for their fellow men. The awful sacrifices of the 
w^ar sanction and support the call of Christ for men's 
lives now in peace. 

For the setting of duty and truth and glory above life 
does not mean always that we are to die for them. More 
often it means that we are not to die at all but to do 
the harder thing and live for them. That will be our 
problem and our testing now. It is easy to draw mis- 
leading inferences from the war analogies. We think 
that because war beheld such unity of national purposes 
and readiness of national sacrifice we shall now see the 
same in peace. War has always been able to draw out 
what peace commands in vain. War is a transient in- 
terest. Peace is an unending task. War appeals to all 
that is worst in men as well as to all that is best. Peace 
can only call upon the highest and truest self. War 
can use the unifying energy of a common hate. Peace 
knows that it is the hater who is hurt by his own hate. 



The Effect of the War 6i 

What war brought forth had its splendor. One can 
understand what the British officer meant, of whom Mr. 
Masefield spoke, who wrote, '' I do not know what I will 
do when this lovely war is over." It had its glories and 
they are gone. But if that which passes away, as Paul 
said, is glorious, how much more glorious is that which 
remains. And what remains? The great religious con- 
victions and moral ideals of which we have been speaking, 
remain. The need of loyalty and devotion and sacrifice 
remains. The task and summons, and the test and en- 
treaty of peace remain. Can men meet these as they 
met the challenge of death ? Can the man do this harder 
thing ? 

" So he died for his faith. That is fine — 

More than most of us can do, 
But, say, can you add to that line 

That he lived for it, too? 

" In his death he bore witness at last 

As a martyr to truth. 
Did his life do the same in the past 

From the days of his youth? 

" It is easy to die. Men have died 

For a wish or a whim — 
From bravado or passion or pride. 

Was it harder for him? 

" But to live — every day to live out 

All the truth that he dreamt, 
While his friends met his conduct with doubt 

And the world with contempt. 

"Was it thus that he plodded ahead, 

Never turning aside? 
Then we'll talk of the life that he led, 

Never mind how he died." 



62 The New Opportunity of the Church 

The war has borne its testimony to the truth of 
Christianity and to the validity of its ethical ideals. And 
now the war is over and gone. But the testimony is 
still here to be used by the Church as it seeks to lead 
men to achieve the manhood and to render the service 
which shone with so bright a glory in the war and which 
are needed not less but more by the nation and by mankind 
in the long days of peace. 



IV 

THE DUTY OF A LARGER CHRISTIAN COOPERATION 

The war has been in its noblest aspects an education 
of the world in some of the fundamental Christian prin- 
ciples. It has also been for the Church an extraordinary 
educational discipline. The Church has learned from 
its own experience what a penetrating and relentless 
teacher war is. War tests persons and ideals and insti- 
tutions in ways in which they have never been tested 
before.. It reveals. It rejects. It demands. And there 
never was a war that did these things so penetratingly 
and relentlessly as the war which has now come to its 
end. We shall be examining the lessons of this war, and 
the experiences it has brought to us all the rest of our 
days, and men will be pondering them for many genera- 
tions yet to come. There is not a department of our 
national life that will not show the effects of this experi- 
ence. Our theology, our education, our politics, our 
social ethics, everything that is related to our life in 
any way will bear the impress of what we have been 
through. 

I wish to siigle out here one aspect of the Church's 
experience — namely the lessons that have come through 
the Church's work in the war, that bear on the prin- 
ciple of interdenominational cooperation, its spirit, its 
limitations, and its possibilities. That is not the only one 

63 



64 The New Opportunity of the Church 

of the problems we face to-day. For there is first of 
all the spiritual problem and the lessons of the war 
relating to that. That is the fundamental problem of all. 
It is not the question of whether we can think out some 
new coordination and rearranging of activities and rela- 
tionships, but, are the dynamics here? Are the energy 
and the power now available which are adequate to do 
the work of to-day? We can think of many possible 
manipulations and adjustments. They will get us no- 
where unless God's men are now here, and God's power 
is in these men to do the work that waits to be done in 
this hour. One thinks back to the days after the Civil 
War. In many ways we are immeasurably in advance 
of those days. We shall not see in our time anything 
like the political corruption that followed the Civil War. 
Our civic life is projected on an entirely different level 
to-day. We have great moral forces beating through 
the nation now, vastly more powerful and beneficent 
than those the nation knew at the end of the Civil War. 
But one asks one's self again and again other questions. 
It seems to me one hears them wherever he goes. 
"Moody, where are you? Where is Moody?" One 
thinks he hears that voice coming out of the sky and from 
the problems on every hand. Where is he, the man of his 
faith, the man of his masterful power, of his creative 
leadership? Have we got such men here to-day? That 
is our first problem, and it would be well worth our 
while to spend thought on that problem. 

Then there are problems of constitution and relationship 
which ought to be studied regarding every institution by 
itself and which inevitably are raised about institutions 
by others without and yet related to them. We have 



The Duty of Cooperation 65 

seen with joy one reaction of this sort among the great 
Lutheran bodies of this land, the war having undoubtedly 
advanced measures already under way looking toward the 
consolidation of three great Lutheran agencies into one 
of the most powerful and promising forces in America. 

It is not of these things that I wush to speak here but 
of what we have learned concerning the question of inter- 
denominational cooperation, looked at from the angle, 
not of our present spiritual problem, although that is 
involved, nor from the angle of constitutional function 
and relationship, but from the plain point of view of 
activities and personal relationships and interdenomi- 
national policy. I wish to speak of five great lessons 
which I believe the experience of the war has taught us 
in regard to the problem viewed in this light. They 
are not new lessons but they have been newly brought 
home to us. 

L First of all, we have been taught clearly the absolute 
indispensableness of an adequate unselfish instrumentality 
for cooperation, in the name of the Church and with 
the consciousness of the Church in its richest historic and 
spiritual significance. I have chosen all these words care- 
fully. Let us eliminate the word unselfish for the mo- 
ment. I will return to it later. Let us first concentrate 
our thought on what the year has shown us concerning 
the absolute indispensableness of an adequate instrumen- 
tality for cooperation in the name of the Church, and 
with the richest Church consciousness. The year has 
taught us that lesson beyond all cavil or question. It 
has shown us that there are ways in which we are abso- 
lutely necessary one to another, that we need one an- 
other's encouragement and inspiration and faith. One 



66 The New Opportunity of the Church 

body will have a vision that has been hidden from an- 
other body which was meant to get it from this body. 
This man in one communion will see an obligation clearly. 
It is meant of God that other communions should catch 
the vision from him. There are men to-day who can tes- 
tify to the vision that came to their communion last year 
through the encouragement, through the challenge, may 
be through the spiritual rebuke they received as 
they compared what they were attempting to do with 
what other bodies were planning. We need our mutual 
faith and encouragement that both our collective and 
our individual purpose may be what otherwise it could 
not be. We have discovered also that cooperation is 
necessary to protect ourselves from one another's mis- 
takes. No communion by withdrawing itself can escape 
the consequences of the mistakes of others. It will simply 
sacrifice the great gains that would accrue from coopera- 
tion. It will not relieve itself from any of the hardships 
and difficulties that come from errors made anywhere in 
the field of Christian action. We realized during the 
war that for simple self-protection it was necessary for 
all the Christian bodies working in the war problem 
to work closely together. We see now that churches 
can reject the benefits of cooperation but they can not 
escape the penalties of separation. In the third place 
we were driven to cooperation because the nation 
had been forced to unite. It would have been an intol- 
erable thing if Christian elements in the nation, bodies 
that had everything in common, a bond of unity more 
deep than anything else on earth, in spite of all that 
may divide, could not work together. Also the churches 
realized from the beginning that we had a task bigger 



The Duty of Cooperation 67 

than all of us together could do and parts of which 
were indivisible. I mean that there were sections of 
the task that could not be denominationalized. There 
were duties which had to be done that could not be 
taken up by anybody in isolation. They had to be dealt 
with by all. It would be an easy thing to multiply 
these grounds of evidence of the indispensableness of an 
adequate instrumentality of interdenominational coopera- 
tion. 

All of these reasons still remain. We still need 
mutual encouragement and help as we face the tasks of 
peace. The tasks of peace are vastly more intricate and 
difficult than the tasks of war. Whatever necessity there 
was during the time of war that we should help one 
another by the measure of our discernment of duty, 
that we should bring to one another the support of our 
mutual faith, we have to-day under much more trying 
and exacting circumstances than in the days of the war. 
We have to protect ourselves to-day against one an- 
other's mistakes and we will have to do it more and 
more as the days go by. Anybody who tries to draw 
himself off will not escape the sure penalty that is going 
to follow the blunders any of us may make. In spite 
of the dissolution of the unity of war the nation will 
pull itself together again before its tasks of peace. New 
communities of interest are growing up in our national 
life. These unities must not be allowed to rebuke us. 
Whatever pressure there was upon the Church in the 
days of war to lead the nation and the world into a 
large and deeper unity, that pressure is on us still. The 
tasks we face now are greater than the war tasks. You 
can exchange every task we had to face in war with a 



68 The New Opportunity of the Church 

greater task still that we must face in peace, and with 
the added duty of supplying now resources of moral unity 
other than war with its mechanical pressure of outward 
danger to the life of the nation can provide. We have 
learned afresh through the experience of the war the 
indispensableness of an adequate continuing agency of 
interdenominational cooperation in the name of the Church 
and with the richest consciousness of all that the Church 
historically and spiritually stands for in our deepest life. 
We have seen also that cooperation must include three 
things. It must include obviously the coordination of 
the forces which aim at common ends and of programs 
which cover common ground. Whatever cooperation we 
have, whatever instrumentality of cooperation, must secure 
this first of all. It must bring together forces that will 
be more in their aggregate than the total of these forces 
added together separately. The principle of unity itself 
increases the sum of the units. It must bring together 
programs in the making rather than in the days of hard- 
ened completion. Secondly it must provide full inter- 
change of knowledge and purpose. It must secure full 
liaison among the Christian forces. That is a word 
that the war has brought into a new significance, an old 
and sinister word to which the war has given a new 
and abiding meaning. It was the essential condition of 
efficiency in every department of our national and inter- 
national experience these last three years. You can write 
the history of these years in the effort of men to achieve 
this kind of correlation, the interchange of knowledge, 
of plan and of sympathetic purpose. The churches 
made some progress in this matter during the war. We 
may thank God for the friendships that had been pre- 



The Duty of Cooperation 69 

pared against this hour between men who stood in places 
of responsibility in the denominational and interdenomi- 
national services of the war time, between whom there 
were relationships of a generation of understanding and 
love so that it was possible to maintain by personal 
relationships an interchange of knowledge, plan, and pur- 
pose, without which problems would have arisen the grav- 
ity of which can hardly be exaggerated. We must delib- 
erately plan permanently for this liaison in the future. I 
do not know how this can be done, whether by some coor- 
dinating committee of men who know and absolutely trust 
one another, who can throw strands across the chasms 
that divide these great moving activities of our day and 
keep them in constant personal touch one with another 
or in some other w^ay. It is not altogether a matter of 
trust. In part it is simply a matter of magnitudes. No 
one man is in position to keep in touch with all that is 
going on. We must secure either in existing agencies or 
by some new piece of machinery a correlation of knowl- 
edge and plan between the different denominations and the 
interdenominational agencies which will meet this second 
need in an adequate instrumentality of cooperation. I 
say we must have an instrumentality of cooperation which 
will provide first for a coordination of interpenetrating 
forces and overlapping programs; in the second place for 
an interchange of intelligence, for a complete and trusted 
liaison between the agencies operating in these fields, 
and in the third place which will supply a wise, collec- 
tive guidance. We need a collective guidance. No one 
of us has wisdom enough to handle his own duty alone. 
There are problems rooted in all the fiber of humanity 
that cannot be dealt with by segments of humanity or 



70 The New Opportunity of the Church 

of the Church. We must think out a method of wise, 
capable and trusted leadership that will supply the collec- 
tive wisdom we need to confront the problems of this 
day. 

All this has been a great gain. It never can be an 
open question again as to whether the Federal Council 
of the Churches of Christ or something that fills that 
ground is an absolutely indispensable necessity. It is 
settled once and for ever by the experience through 
which we went in the war that we must have an agency 
of denominational cooperation that will be adequate to 
supply these needs of which I have been speaking. 

II. In the second place the experience of the war has 
thrown a great deal of light on the principles and prob- 
lems of this interdenominational service and coordination 
which is necessary. It has shown us how w^e need it for 
the ends to which I have just referred. It has shown 
us also how it can be secured, and that it is not by re- 
adjustments of constitutional relationships nor by deter- 
mination of theoretical allotments of power and authority. 
These have their place. But this problem which the 
churches are facing now is a problem of service and per- 
sonal relationship and cooperative adjustment, and we 
will get off on false quests if we follow the other lines. 
If we solve the problems of service and friendship the 
other problems will work themselves out wisely, and in 
order that that may be done, may I bring out that word 
unselfish already spoken of. It is evident that the only 
kind of instrumentality that will adequately meet this 
need and fill this field must be one that is marked by 
institutional disinterestedness. One recalls the three qual- 
ifications of leadership of which Emerson speaks in his 



The Duty of Cooperation 71 

essay on Courage, — first, disinterestedness, second, prac- 
tical power, and third, courage. These are the three 
qualifications of leadership in individual men and they are 
the qualifications of leadership in movements and insti- 
tutions as w^ell. Let anybody have the credit. The 
important thing is that any agency that sets out to do 
w^ork for the churches should lose its life in the doing of 
it. It should seek no honor v^^hatever of its ow^n. Some 
of our problems spring from our forgetting that. Let 
honor be given w^here honor is due. It is no sign of 
strength or efficiency to seek to monopolize glory. ** In 
honor preferring one another." We remember w^hat 
comes next! There is no intimation v^hatever that this 
honoring recognition of others impairs one's efficiency in 
his own task. " In honor preferring one another, not 
slothful in business." They go together inevitably. 
They go together in personal leadership. I am not 
speaking now of that. Thank God that there is so much 
disinterested personal service. But they go together in 
institutional leadership. 

We have learned through the war one other thing, 
namely, that the churches must frankly face and solve the 
problem of supplying among themselves a leadership that 
is neither too strong nor too weak. You can not have 
a leadership that is too strong and that breaks away 
from its following or coerces it, nor too weak to fill 
Emerson^s third requirement of leadership, that there 
must be courage in it. 

Now these are not easy things to bring about. They 
are difficult because they run down into fundamental 
principles. They lead us into difficulty but that is the 
only place that it is worth while for us to go, because 



72 The New Opportunity of the Church 

our problem is not one of mechanics, nor of external 
adjustments, but the hard problem of love, of confidence, 
of the freedom, power and strength that invariably go 
with life. This is the second thing the churches have 
learned. 

III. In the third place we have learned even more 
clearly that the pathway of cooperative advance lies 
through the field of action and embodied activity and serv- 
ice, rather than through the field of discussion or of the at- 
tempt to settle the theoretical principles of such activities 
and service. We are united as together we face tasks and 
by the magnitude and urgency of the tasks are drawn 
together to their doing. Not that I do not appreciate 
theory. In the last analysis that is all it comes down to. 
A friend said recently that the more he saw of what we 
were trying to do, the more convinced he became that 
the only thing the Church needs is the theologian, and 
in the highest sense that is true. I have been thankful 
for a word spoken a year or two ago at a meeting of 
alumni at Princeton when some reflection or discredit 
had been cast on the idea and all value had been attributed 
to action, and Dr. Richardson had quoted in reply the 
saying of Jesus, " The words that I speak unto you, 
they are spirit and they are life.'' We will ever be 
brought back to this even if we do not start from it. 
But what we have learned this year is the power of 
embodied undertakings. We have been discussing a great 
deal the matter of enlisting young men for the Christian 
ministry. How are we going to get them? We are 
not going to get them simply by laying before them prin- 
ciples. That will do very well to help a man, but it is 
not going to win him to unaccustomed action. We are 



The Duty of Cooperation 73 

not going to get him by telling him the reasons why a 
man should live his life unselfishly. We will get him as 
the nation got him. We have to go to young men and 
say to them, '' You can not go to France to-day, but 
you can finish the war which is still unfinished by going 
out into the world and building Christ's Kingdom, by 
accomplishing other tasks which are as real and as neces- 
sary as those you were going to France to accomplish. '' 
I think we are going to get men in just that way. One 
has thought a good deal — every one must have thought 
— why it was that the nation was able to secure such 
sacrifice and service in the war, while the Church has 
not been able to get it before the war or now. How 
did the nation succeed in getting men to give themselves 
away, in getting the nation itself to give everything, its 
money, its life? It succeeded, some say, because it asked 
for everything. But the nation did not ask for everything, 
and it did not get everything. There were areas of men's 
minds atrophying in the camps, which the nation did 
not ask for at all. Many of the very finest aspects of 
life the nation did not ask for, and couldn't use. It 
did ask for men's bodies. I believe when you get down 
to the truth that that is the explanation. This is what 
St. Paul asked for: "I beseech you by the mercies of 
God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice." 
That is what we may reverently say God had to have in 
his greatest piece of work — a body. The Incarnation 
was God in a body. The Atonement demanded the 
body of Christ's flesh through death. The Resurrection 
included the resurrection of His body. All had 
to be done through a body. We see clearly from 
this point of view the reason for the emphasis on 



74 The New Opportunity of the Church 

certain types of sin, the sin of evil speech, the sin of 
theft. Evil speech is the one sin you can bite. Stealing 
is the one sin you can do only with your hands. In 
many lands the punishment for theft is cutting oif the 
hand so that men can not steal any more. Sin and re- 
demption alike are done in the body. Our Saviour needed 
a body to reach us. He reaches us in our bodies. By 
the same principle we deal best with our problem of 
cooperation as we embody our ideals, objectify our ends, 
and set before men tasks to be done, ends actually to 
be traveled to, and arrived at. 

The war has laid before us with luminous clearness 
more of these tasks that demand one approach through 
action. Let us pick out four or five of these before which 
the churches will be impotent if we can not adequately 
deal with them in cooperation. There is the problem 
of the rightful place of religion in the American Army. 
It is one of the distressing problems which the churches 
still confront. I wonder whether we are one inch ahead 
of where we were when the war began. It took months 
and months before the churches could get, against in- 
difference or opposition, one chaplain to every twelve 
hundred men, and then we did not get them. There 
never was one chaplain to every twelve hundred men 
in the army. We should have had almost to double 
the maximum number of chaplains we had in France 
before we would have had one to twelve hundred. 
The chaplain has been able to get no status. Every 
other branch of the army in the United States has 
a satisfactory relationship which army chaplains have 
not been able to get. Maybe it can be secured when 
General Pershing and the Chaplains' organization in 



The Duty of Cooperation 75 

France come back from the other side but we simply 
have not had it here and we seem unlikely ever to get 
it unless the churches seek it unitedly in some different 
way. Indeed they have hindered themselves by such 
division in their approach to the problem as there was 
during the war. 

In the second place there is the problem of recruiting 
men for Christian service. There were nearly five mil- 
lion young men in the army and navy of the United 
States. Practically all of the men that we are going 
to need for the Christian ministry, for foreign missionary 
work, for the Association secretaryship, for all of the 
other forms of Christian and philanthropic service were 
there in these five million young men in the army and 
navy. The churches never had before such a chance 
with all the body of supply physically brought together 
and under psychological conditions such as we had not 
known before, to reap such a harvest of leadership as 
had never been garnered in the history of the nation. 
There were also the men in the camps on this side who 
never got to France and who are rapidly being sent 
back to their homes. There are among them many 
men cast down and filled with disappointment and 
chagrin. They are going back to their homes in a few 
days or weeks and they will be asked, " What battle were 
you in? What were your experiences in France? " And 
they will have to say, '' I was never in France.'* They 
laid all they had on the altar of the nation in utter and 
absolute sacrifice and never had the chance to have that 
gift used in actual service. There is going to be perma- 
nent moral damage done to some of these men if their 
great impulse of sacrifice and devotion can not be given an 



76 The New Opportunity of the Church 

adequate object, if we can not supply something that will 
atone for the bitterest disappointment of their lives. We 
can go to them to-day and say: '* Men, you do not need 
to be cast down. The w^ar is not over. The hardest part 
of the war is yet to be fought, the part that calls for the 
highest heroism, the deepest courage, the hardest sacrifice. 
The war is just beginning. Will you not throw your- 
self into it now for life and death?" 

There are the men on the other side, doctors, lawyers, 
teachers, ministers, from all classes and occupations at 
home, foot-loose now, as men have never been, to give 
themselves to the unselfish service of mankind, who are 
coming home rapidly. Let me quote a few paragraphs 
from a letter from a friend who is a Lieutenant Colonel 
in the Medical Corps in France: 

" With the end of the war and the actual signing of the 
peace compacts, which is now surely not far oflF, all the mil- 
lions of men in our armies will be, sooner or later, returned 
to the home-land, to face the problem of their future employ- 
ment or activities. Among them will be some thousands of 
medical men. Most of these men will return with their old 
positions and practices calling for them, but still footloose. 
Many of them, and especially the younger ones, will come back 
to begin life entirely anew, free as no like body of medical 
men in our experience have ever been to choose the field of 
their activities. All of them will return with wider views of 
life and of the possibilities of their work than have heretofore 
been common among medical men. 

" There can be no doubt that the world will be open as a 
field for the efforts of these men. You know how many places 
have been waiting for the end of the war to release the medical 
men they are in need of. The question of deepest interest to 
us is how many of them can be enlisted in the missionary service, 
how many the mission societies are prepared to seek and employ. 

" I know well that the problem of the extent and character 



The Duty of Cooperation 77 

of the medical -work that could properly be made part of the 
missionary effort has long been the subject of much study and 
consideration on your part. It seems to me that this calls for 
definite decisions of the utmost importance to the future of 
missions at this time. There is no doubt that if the Church is 
ready to go forward, there is an opportunity the like of which 
will never within our lifetimes come again. Never again will 
there be so many men, peculiarly fitted by their experience to 
listen to the call to world-wide service and also qualified 
by their experience to meet the call with unusual ability. The 
question the Church must face is how far it is prepared to go 
in enlisting medical men for work in foreign fields and also 
"what scope it will seek to give to the men it secures." 

We have our chance to present to these men the ideal 
of going forward with that with which they had begun. 

And there were the lads in our colleges and universi- 
ties. Never were the colleges more open to appeals offer- 
ing men unselfish service, the moral equivalent of war, 
as they were at the time of the demobilization of the 
Students' Army Training Corps. Unless one was with 
them then he can not imagine the state of mind in v^^hich 
these boys were. If ever they were ripe for some great 
and heroic appeal they were ripe for it then. You could 
not denominationalize the appeal to them. They had 
heard the united voice of their country speaking and 
they replied to that united voice. If the churches wanted 
those lads for Christian service to-day, it was necessary 
for them to approach the problem unitedly with one heart 
and one appeal. The boys would have found their own 
appropriate place of personal service afterwards if we could 
have made the command adequate enough and spoken to 
them with an adequately appealing and united voice. 
As a matter of fact the opportunity was allow^ed to pass by. 



78 The New Opportunity of the Church 

In the third place there is the problem of Christianity 
and education. He is a blind man who does not see that 
one great lesson that this war has taught is the importance 
of education to national character and purpose. Never 
again will the State be willing to allow the educa^-ion of 
the nation to slip out of its fingers as it has let it 
slip out in the past. '' What is the next lesson of the 
war?" asked Lloyd George in a speech at Manchester, 
and he answered, *' We must pay more attention to the 
school. The most formidable institution we had to fight 
in Germany was not the arsenals of Krupp or the yards 
in which they turned out submarines, but the schools of 
Germany. They were our most formidable competitors 
in business and our most terrible opponents in war. An 
educated man is a better worker, a more formidable 
warrior and a better citizen. That was only half com- 
prehended here before the war." What some have been 
criticizing in Japan is just what we may anticipate that 
many nations will seek to do in the days that lie ahead 
of us. We see what the education of a nation skillfully 
guided can accomplish. Processes, carefully thought out 
by men who know the principles of genetic psychology 
as this war has illustrated them afresh, are going to play 
on us and our children after us. State supervision and 
other secular administration of these processes and of 
the ordinary forms of education are inevitable. The 
Christian churches are facing a problem the right solution 
of which is vital to the very life of Christianit>\ And we 
are never going to solve that problem along our old lines 
of division and separation, of not bringing our forces 
together in a way to meet the consequences of secularized 



The Duty of Cooperation 79 

education with which we shall have to deal. I have a 
friend who has taught for some years in the philosophical 
faculty in one of our five largest American universities. 
This friend has told me that out of twenty-six professors 
and associate professors of philosophy there were only 
two in the faculty who did not teach a mechanistic view 
of life. And this university is perhaps doing as much 
as any other to shape the educational life of America. 
And it is only too representative. The Christian churches 
have to deal unitedly with the problem of Christian 
education, if they do not want the ground cut from under 
them by processes of secularized education which will 
teach philosophical theories that are absolutely fatal to 
all w^hich we most dearly believe both in politics and in 
religion, and if the work of a moralized American educa- 
tion of all the people is to be achieved. 

In the fourth place consider this great complex of 
problems which are developing on the home mission hori- 
zon. The new home mission responsibilities need to 
be interpreted in the richest way. It will be a great 
loss if after the war we do not accept a far ampler view 
of the functions of all our home mission agencies. We 
can easily name some of the problems. Again and again 
to-day we refer to the problem of the returning soldier. 
The problem of the returning soldier can not be handled 
in a divided way by a score of competing denominations. 
Of course the soldier who goes back to his own communion 
will be welcome there, but there are tens of thousands 
of these men who had no denominational attachment be- 
fore they went abroad. Are they all to be scrambled 
for by the churches, each one offering its own wares? 



8o The New Opportunity of the Church 

The problems can be met only as with a comprehensive 
spirit and united approach, the Church of this land deals 
with them in sincerity and unselfishness. 

And the problems are far more complex than the mere 
issue of associating the soldier with a particular Christian 
organization upon his return to his community. Is he 
to be a different sort of citizen in the light of his experi- 
ence, different in his own ideals and demands, different 
in his contribution to the community and the nation? 
And the problem of the community to which he returns 
is a greater problem than he is. Is it to be the same 
kind of community it was before and what is the Church 
going to do to deal with it? Are the old American 
ideals of democracy, tolerance and respect to be perpet- 
uated? There is the problem of community Christian 
education. There are hopeful experiments already being 
made in this field to effect the adequate coordination and 
guidance of all Christian forces. The day has gone by 
when the denominational Sunday School alone, one of our 
most valuable Christian forces, isolated from other agen- 
cies and unsupported by all the Christian energies which 
can be poured into it, can cope with the problem of re- 
ligious education in the American community. And 
there is the problem of community Christian service as 
well as of community Christian education. Some are 
foolishly proposing schemes which involve the abrogation 
of the home as a Christian and social institution, but 
between the home and the nation there do lie areas of 
social life covered vaguely by the term " community " 
which are to be Christianized. The community to be 
sure is not a unit. It has its horizontal and its vertical 
stratifications but these do not conform to the denomina- 



The Duty of Cooperation 8i 

tional divisions and they are unified by common inter- 
ests and common social issues which require of the Church 
a community consciousness and a community approach. 
There is also and on a national scale the problem of our 
moral and social health. The churches can handle such 
a problem only as they handle it unitedly. The war has 
given them such an opportunity. It has shown that 
certain things are essential to the highest efficiency of 
soldiers, that if we are going to fight a successful war, 
we can not do it with drunken and diseased men. If 
we can not fight a great war with that kind of men, can 
we build a great nation in time of peace with that kind 
of men? We have discovered that the type of man we 
need in time of war is the type of man we need in time 
of peace. We see new^ ideals in this matter and not only 
new ideals but new possibilities as well. We have real- 
ized that there are certain moral achievements not to be 
left in the realm of the impracticable; that it is possible 
to wipe out the saloon and that it is possible to wipe out 
the brothel. If for eighteen months of war it was demon- 
strated that it was possible to keep the brothel an<l saloon 
five miles away from our men in the Army, why shall 
it not be possible to destroy them and keep them away 
from the young men outside of the Army for all time? 
But who dreams that it can be done by disunited effort? 
And there is the problem of the unification of the national 
spirit and the true American education of all the foreign 
elements in the national body. We may describe it in 
all sorts of terms, assimilation, Americanization, nation- 
alization. It is a common task that can be worked at 
of course by all kinds and groups of people, but they can 
work it out efficiently only as they unwastefuUy coordi- 



82 The New Opportunity of the Church 

nate their forces in a common service and to one great end, 
and as they face the economic and psychological elements 
of the problem in the spirit and with the principles of 
Christianity. How otherwise are just grievances of the 
negro race and of those who suffer from economic in- 
justice to be dealt with and cleared away? 

In the fifth place there are the new demands for coop- 
eration and coordination in connection with the foreign 
missionary undertaking and the need of the organic con- 
solidation of whatever can be organically consolidated. 
We started the foreign missionary work in America with 
a great ideal, with the ideal that one organization might 
operate foreign missionary work for the American 
churches, and the American Board for some years embod- 
ied that ideal. It proved premature. And there has been 
enormous gain in the last one hundred years from the 
denominational differentiation of foreign missionary re- 
sponsibility, but we may be coming around now to a re- 
turn in part at least to those great ideals with which 
we began. We are clear at any rate that there ought 
to be the closest consolidation of our approach to the 
non-Christian world. There is also the whole problem 
of missionary education at home. We are coming to 
unity of mind in this matter, for the missionary obliga- 
tion is one obligation. The motives that lead Methodists 
to give to the support of foreign missions are identical 
with those that lead the Presbyterians and Baptists to 
give to the support of foreign missions. In effecting the 
full pressure of the missionary obligation on the Church 
at home, only united action can avail. It is the universal 
Christ who is to be made known to the world. The 
views of all of us about Him are still less than He, and 



The Duty of Cooperation 83 

our combined apprehension of Him alone can furnish 
adequate and commanding motive to any group or division. 
The war revealed in many different spheres the power of 
united pressures. 

And further, there is the necessity in the United States 
of our supplying through the foreign missions' concep- 
tions the ideas that must underlie the basis of peace 
which must be laid if this war is not to have been waged 
in vain. It is the foreign missionary enterprise which 
is the custodian of the principles on which alone the 
League of Nations can ever be built up. These principles 
can not be isolated as the property of any one group. 
No one group can adequately proclaim them. If they 
belong to one they belong to us all. It is what is the 
property of us all in those principles which can alone 
sustain a friendly world order and by as much as we 
believe in that, by as much as we believe that the blood 
of eight million men will have been shed in vain unless 
that is to be achieved, by that much are we under obli- 
gation to accomplish any new pressure of coordination 
necessary to our supplying to the world the fundamental 
conceptions that underlie a new and brotherly interna- 
tional relationship. 

The third lesson from the last year accordingly is that 
we have before us certain great indivisible tasks; that 
these tasks if we will attack them together will supply 
us with the most effective path of advance in denomina- 
tional cooperation. 

IV. A fourth lesson which the experience of the year 
has taught the churches relates to the processes and 
the forms of their cooperative action. There has not 
been any new discovery. There has been only a larger 



84 The New Opportunity of the Church 

application of what had already been ascertained and 
was already existent in the forms of organization and 
service in the Federal Council of the Churches. Only 
the emphasis was changed somewhat. There had been 
two types of associated action through the commissions 
of the Federal Council. In one the Federal Council 
selected individuals and brought them together in a 
commission wuth considerable freedom of action and with 
responsibility to the Federal Council alone. In the other 
method the attempt to correlate the organic activities of 
the denominations and to bring them together did not 
give the same freedom that the first method did, but it 
did give a larger weight of responsibility. The General 
War Time Commission of the Churches, the central war 
agency of the churches, made use chiefly of this second 
method during the war. The committees which it estab- 
lished, the Committee on Training and Recruiting Men 
for the Ministry, the Committee on War Production 
Communities and the work which they did constituted 
some of the best work of the war. They represented the 
attempt to bring together the organic activities of denomi- 
nations. There has been during the last few years a great 
growth of the sense of denominational personality and 
we do not want to break that down unless there is some- 
thing better to take its place. The danger is that it is 
breaking down and dissolving in some directions before 
it has entirely fulfilled its functions. In the war work 
of the churches the effort was honestly made to conserve 
all that is good. Some said that the churches were mak- 
ing a mistake and emphasizing denominationalism. All 
that those who ever acted for them were trying to do 
was to bring together in an effective cooperative way the 



The Duty of Cooperation 85 

really responsible denominational agencies. That method 
may hold back some of the more far-visioned and en- 
thusiastic men. Perhaps it is wise that they should be 
held back a little, while we keep together the men who 
represent the organic responsibility of the different com- 
munions and seek by mutual interchange to get forward. 
And it will be a great pity if as we go forward we do 
not conserve all the gains of the past in this regard, even 
if it makes some of us impatient because the progress is 
not so rapid as it might be if we might detach ourselves 
from these responsible relationships. The Foreign Mis- 
sions Conference of North America and the Home Mis- 
sions Council of the United States illustrate the strength 
of this method of cooperation. 

We should learn to-day from the war a further lesson 
as to the process of leadership that one might not per- 
haps learn so readily in days of peace. The problem 
in the war has been not so much to create energies, as 
to guide and shape them. The war split open the soul 
of America, and great tides of moral and spiritual power 
have come gushing out which needed only wise guidance 
and relationship. This may not be so true in the future 
days of peace, but for the present these tides are still run- 
ning. The next great step which is to be accomplished in 
the name of the Church and under the guidance of some 
agency of the Church which represents the full con- 
sciousness of the Church, is to bring these forces to- 
gether in this time. It is amazing how many of them 
there are loose to-day in American life and the need is 
great of drawing them together and giving wise guidance 
to these energies. There is also much bew^ilderment in 
America to-day. Is there one who has not been hearing 



86 The New Opportunity of the Church 

from the younger men in the ministry of the perplexity 
with which they are facing their problems? Some device 
must be set up which will accomplish the correlation of 
all these energies and give men's minds wise and united 
guidance in the common task. 

V. And lastly, there is a fifth lesson. We have learned 
from this war that men have no business going into a 
war unless they intend to stay in it until it has been won. 
There was a time, some months ago, when the President 
recommended a ^' peace without victory,'' but his recom- 
mendation was not accepted by one section of those to 
whom it was addressed. The section willing to accept 
the suggestion reminds us of the story of the two women 
who appeared before Solomon. One of them, we re- 
member, was ready for a peace without victory. And 
we remember which one it was. If anybody had ad- 
dressed to the President after we had entered the war 
such an exhortation he would have met it exactly as the 
allied nations of Europe met it from him. We know 
that a nation has no business to go into a war if it is 
not ready to choose between two alternatives, either 
to win the war or to be destroyed. Only the willing- 
ness to make such a choice can justify the extremity 
of war. And I believe we went into it on that prin- 
ciple. Once we had gone into it nothing until the end 
of time would have brought us out until the war had 
been won or we had been utterly overthrown. I remem- 
ber a conference which we had with one of our visitors 
from Great Britain a short time ago, just after his 
arrival here, when we were discussing this matter. He 
was feeling exceedingly despondent. He did not be- 
lieve that Germany ever would be defeated. He believed 



The Duty of Cooperation 87 

that the war would end without any decisive triumph for 
the principles for which we were contending. We said he 
did not understand America. America might have a 
reputation for mercurial and changeable spirit but it 
w^as not so and once she had set her hand to a task like 
this she would never take her hand off until the task was 
done. And now the same principle holds in all spheres of 
action. We have started on certain relationships in the 
attempt to accomplish certain tasks. There is no withdraw- 
ing from them. We have set out as a Christian Church in 
a great war. There is no holding back and there is no 
stopping until we get through, absolutely none. This move- 
ment of closer coordination and cooperation is never going 
to stop. It is going to grow year by year with increasing 
power. We may make mistakes. It is conceivable that 
we should make such colossal mistakes as to destroy any 
existing agencies of cooperation so that new agencies 
would have to be set up in their stead, but as sure as there 
will be a sunrise to-morrow another agency would be 
set up in their stead, because we are moving in a great 
progress from which we can never draw out or be drawn 
back. The only question we face to-day is whether we 
are going to be courageous enough, disinterested enough, 
wise enough to discern our time and to pass into this 
time with instrumentalities which we are called upon to 
devise and control and direct that are adequate for the 
tasks of this day. All of the great values that have come 
out of the war with us call upon us for this thing — the 
realization of how much more powerful great moral ideals 
are than all things else, the discovery of how the sense 
of something better ahead can command anything from 
men, and, what is in one sense more wonderful even than 



88 The New Opportunity of the Church 

all of these, and what the soldier feels to have been the 
greatest thing that the war has brought to him, the sheer 
glory of an unwithholding comradeship. In the camps, 
in the trenches, wherever the soldiers were, this was 
the splendid achievement of their great experience, 
the communized consciousness of a brotherhood that 
shares everything, that has pooled men's life blood, that 
has made them one in one great sacrificial, national en- 
deavor. Can we not match that and surpass it in the 
body of Christ? Do not hours come when we know we 
have matched it, when we feel the glow in our own hearts, 
the longing to cross the chasms between man and man, 
to produce at last here in the midst of our nation to-day 
a fellowship so real, so commanding, that in the atmos- 
phere of it we do not need to solve our problems, for we 
shall find that they have disappeared? 



THE WAR AIMS AND FOREIGN MISSIONS 

The war was so big and it is still so near that it is not 
possible yet to comprehend it. It has a thousand faces 
which we shall be studying all the rest of our lives and 
centuries will have to pass before men can see it in its 
true perspective and proportion. But some things about 
it are already sufficiently clear. And one of them is 
that the war was the greatest proclamation of foreign 
missions which we have ever heard. 

It is interesting to mark the way in which, one after 
another, the great ideas and principles of the missionary 
enterprise were taken over and declared by the nation 
as its moral aims in the w^ar. If we will review 
these aims we shall see how completely they have been 
accepted from the foreign missionary undertaking. There 
ought not to be any doubt or misgiving in our minds as 
to what the aims were which, as we believed, justified 
us in what we did, and which, if they were valid during 
the war, as they were, are equally valid now ; for certainly 
what we fought for in the war we have no right to re- 
pudiate now in peace. 

What was it for which we fought in the war? To 
avoid reading back into the struggle moral aims w^hich 
are an afterthought and which are imagined into the 
struggle for apologetic or homiletic purposes, let me re- 

89 



90 The New Opportunity of the Church 

call words written in the midst of the war times, when 
we were striving to see clearly our present duty without 
thought of any later moral inferences that might be drawn 
from the statements of duty that then satisfied us. These 
words were written with no reference to foreign missions 
but with a view to defining for the Christian conscience 
the purposes which warranted the war. This was the 
statement : 

There ought to be no doubt among Christian men as to what 
we are fighting for in the war, — as to the great moral and 
spiritual ends which Justify it. 

We are fighting to put an end, if we can, to war and to the 
burden and terror of armaments. It cannot be too often said 
that it is a war against war that we are waging. Both mili- 
tarists and pacifists often deride this idea, the former because 
they do not think that war can be or perhaps ought to be 
destroyed, the latter because they do not believe that war can 
ever be ended by war. But there are millions of men who 
hate war and believe it must be ended and who are able 
with conscience and determination to support this war because 
it seems to them unavoidable and necessary as a struggle 
directly aimed at war itself. They did not want war. The 
precipitation of the war by Germany outraged all their deepest 
convictions. And the principles and convictions and practices 
as to the nature and method of war on the part of Germany 
seem to these millions of men to be intolerable on our earth. 
To give them unhindered room would make the world an 
impossible home for free and friendly men. They must be 
destroyed. War against them is war against war. It is war 
for peace. 

This purpose also nerves the men at the front on whom the 
burden falls heaviest. They see the irrationality and wicked- 
ness of war more clearly than any one else. What sustains 
them is the thought that they are enduring it so that no one 
else may have to endure it. The thing is so dreadful that it 
is worth every sacrifice to slay it and to make sure that the 
world will not have to go through it again. 

We are fighting against aggressive autocracy. Not yet against 



The War Aims and Foreign Missions 91 

autocracy itself. We disbelieve in it and we fear it, but if any 
nation wants it for itself and can have it without letting it 
imperil all other nations thus far we have said that we have 
no right to interfere. It is not our business. Each people has 
the right of self-government. But we cannot sit quiet and let 
autocracy, unwilling to stay at home, go abroad to rule the 
world. It is the strong nation invading other nations, attack- 
ing the rights of humanity, perpetrating wrong and injustice, 
that must be resisted and bound to keep the peace, just as the 
strong man breaking the laws of society and perpetrating wrong 
and injustice in the state must be bound to desist from wrong. 

We are fighting against the claim of nations to be above the 
moral law. A state cannot endure if one class of its citizens 
is allowed to excuse itself from the moral obligations which 
bind all others. And the world cannot endure if any nation is 
allowed to set itself above the principles of truth and justice 
and righteousness which have their ground in the character of 
God and which are the foundation of individual life and must 
be the foundation of international life and of international 
relationship. It is moral anarchy for any nation to set itself 
and its interests above the laws of God, which are laws of 
universal right and justice. 

We are fighting against the idea of power as its own law, 
against the ancient claim of might to be its own right. This 
idea, if yielded to, puts an end to civilization. If we merely 
match might with might and try to disprove the claims of 
might by superior might we support the very law we attack. 
But if we use might for right and hold it subject to right, and 
repudiate utterly the principle that it is or can be anything 
apart from right, we may safely and we must unyieldingly 
oppose what strength we have or can get from God against 
the falsehood of power as its own warrant for aught that it 
can do. The very essence of evil is in this falsehood and 
must be destroyed. 

And we are not only fighting against great falsehoods and 
wrong, we are fighting for a new world order of concord and 
peace and justice. Just as in each nation the elements which 
had to be combined were compelled to give up their separate 
claim to the end that a righteous and stable political order could 



92 The New Opportunity of the Church 

be established, so now we realize that the world must in some 
simple and practical way be reorganized to provide some in- 
strumentality of international justice which will settle difficulties 
by peaceful, judicial processes, as men settle their difficulties 
among themselves without murder or any violence. To carry 
mankind forward by such a big advance is worth any sacrifice 
necessary to win it. 

All of these things ought to have been won without war. 
They have not been. Against our wills the great war which 
involves these issues came out and laid hold upon us and, 
whether we would or no, we had to take up our part. And 
now that duty cannot be played with. Asking God for His 
forgiveness for all that has been wrong in ourselves, humbly 
trusting His grace and seeking His strength, we are to take 
up our task in the spirit of those who know only one fidelity, 
the fidelity that knows no yielding until its task is done. 
Without hate or pride or wrong-doing, without using against 
evil the evil we deplore, without malice toward any one and 
with charity toward all men, including our foes, with patience 
and tenacity and deathless devotion, we are to do the work that 
has come to us until it is done and done to last. 

It is the business of the Church to keep clear and unconfused 
these moral ends which alone justify the war, to warn men 
against hate and evil will, to strengthen in men's hearts the 
sense of deathless devotion to duty, to encourage faith in the 
possibility of establishing on the earth a righteous order worth 
living and dying for, to show men that they must and can 
behave now as citizens in a manner worthy of the Gospel 
of Christ, to maintain in the soul of the nation an unswerving 
loyalty to righteousness and a fearless love of all humanity, 
to make the nation humble and penitent before God, and to 
summon it to such obedience to God's holy law that it can 
confidently offer itself to Him for the accomplishment of His 
purposes of justice and truth. 

Here were five clear moral aims; to put an end to 
war, and the fear of war and the burden of arma- 
ments, to assure human freedom, to assert and establish the 



The War Alms and Foreign Missions 93 

principle of international righteousness, to use strength 
for human service, to prepare the way for an order of 
truth and justice and brotherhood. As the war went 
on these aims grew clearer and firmer, (i) "This is 
a war to end war " became a universal watchword. 
The military spirit which kindled and flamed in human 
hearts blazed most fiercely against militarism, and re- 
pudiated with deepening horror and loathing the whole 
philosophy of war, its colossal inefficiency and its exorbi- 
tant waste. (2) The indignation against the autocratic 
governments which were responsible for the war, although 
at first this indignation proclaimed no doom upon autoc- 
racy as a political theory, came gradually to realize that 
autocracy can not confine itself to any bounds and is not 
able to be harmless. The spread of the spirit of liberty 
of itself overthrew one by one all the autocracies that 
entered the war. (3) The nation saw with increasing 
clearness that wrong is wrong no matter w^ho perpe- 
trates it, whether a nation or a man, and likewise that 
the duty of service and protection is a national as w^ell 
as a personal duty. (4) The war became a great enter- 
prise of human service. Nations fed one another and 
stood ready to die for one another and for the safety 
of mankind. (5) And above all as time went on men 
realized that they were in this struggle for the sake 
of what lies ahead of us, for the hope of a new human 
order — an order of righteousness and of justice and of 
brotherhood. If it were not for that hope ahead, all 
the arguments that spring from what lies behind would 
not have been enough to sustain men. Once men had 
got into their minds that the same thing was going to 
be afterward that was before, the war would have been 



94 The New Opportunity of the Church 

over that day or the next. Men were not going into the 
war and dying for the sake of punishing somebody for 
what lay behind alone, or for the sake of executing venge- 
ance for great wrongs. You cannot sustain sacrifices like 
these or memories. They must be sustained on great 
expectations. Even our Lord, Himself, was upheld by 
what lay before Him, ** Who for the joy that was set 
before him endured the cross, despising shame, and hath 
sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.'' 

I have named just as briefly as I could what seem to 
me to be five of the great moral justifications for the 
war, justifications that made legitimate the sacrifices that 
were poured out, and that laid the obligation of the 
struggle to the last effort upon every life in our land. 
But, when we have said this, have we said anything more 
than just to put into political terms, in connection with 
the great struggle, the aims and ideals and purposes for 
which many men have been living all their lives, which 
have actuated the missionary enterprise, and which under- 
lie it to-day? What does that enterprise exist for? 
What has it been seeking to do, and in reality doing all 
the years since it began? 

It has been in the world as an instrumentality of peace 
and international good will. Wherever it has gone, it 
has erased racial prejudice and bitterness, the great root 
of international conflict and struggle. It has helped men 
to understand one another. It has rubbed off the fric- 
tions. '* Christianity continues to spread among the 
Karens," said the Administration Report for British 
Burmah for 1880-1881, ''to the great advantage of the 
Commonwealth, and the Christian Karen communities 
are distinctly more industrious, better educated and more 



The War Aims and Foreign Missions 95 

law-abiding than the Burman and Karen villages around 
them. The Karen race and the British government owe 
a great debt to the American missionaries who have, 
under Providence, wrought this change among the Karens 
of Burmah/' At the outset of missionary w^ork in India, 
Schwartz had illustrated this power of missions, com- 
manding the confidence of the people, and securing peace 
and order where the East India Company and the native 
rulers themselves were helpless. ** Send me none of your 
agents," Hyder Ali said to the Company in some of their 
negotiations. ** Send me the Christian missionary, 
Schw^artz, and I will receive him.'^ ** To be welcomed in 
the land of cannibals," said a Dutch traveler in Sumatra, 
Lunbing Hirum, ** by children singing hymns, this indeed 
shows the peace-creating power of the gospel." ** The 
benefits " (of the missionary work in New Guinea), said 
Hugh Milman, a magistrate, *' are immense; inter-tribal 
fights formerly so common, being entirely at an end, 
and trading and communication, one tribe with another, 
now being carried on without fear." 

Missionaries have been a conciliatory influence again 
and again, and have allayed hostility which diplomats 
and traders have aroused. They did this in Japan. The 
Jiji Shimpo, one of the leading newspapers in Japan, 
spoke of this in advocating the sending of Buddhist mis- 
sionaries to Korea. '' Japanese visiting Korea will be 
chiefly bent upon the pursuit of gain and will not be 
disposed to pay much attention to the sentiments and 
customs of the Koreans or to allow their spirit to be 
controlled by any consideration of the country or the 
people. That was the case with foreigners in the early 
days of Japan's intercourse with them, and there can be 



96 The New Opportunity of the Church 

no doubt that many serious troubles would have occurred 
had not the Christian missionary acted as a counter- 
balancing influence. The Christian missionary not only 
showed to the Japanese the altruistic side of the Occi- 
dental character, but also by his teaching and his preach- 
ing imparted a new and attractive aspect to intercourse 
which would otherwise have seemed masterful and re- 
pellent. The Japanese cannot thank the Christian mis- 
sionary too much for the admirable leaven that he intro- 
duced into their relations with foreigners, nor can they 
do better than follow the example that he has set, in 
their own intercourse with the Koreans." 

And missionaries in the same conciliatory spirit have 
been the main factors in opening some sealed lands to 
international intercourse. The United States Govern- 
ment's treaty with Siam was negotiated in 1856, and 
Dr. Wood of the Embassy wrote that *' the unselfish 
kindness of the American missionaries, their patience, 
sincerity and faithfulness, have won the confidence and 
esteem of the natives, and in some degree transferred 
those sentiments to the nation represented by the mission- 
ary and prepared the way for the free and national inter- 
course now commencing. It was very evident that much 
of the apprehension they felt in taking upon themselves 
the responsibilities of a treaty with us would be dimin- 
ished if they could have the Rev. Mr. Mattoon as the 
first United States Consul to set the treaty in motion.'' 
In 1 87 1, the Regent of Siam frankly told Mr. Seward, 
the United States Consul-General at Shanghai, ** Siam 
has not been disciplined by English and French guns as 
China has, but the country has been opened by mission- 
aries." 



The War Aims and Foreign Missions 97 

Of the work of the Scotch Presbyterians in Nyassa land, 
Joseph Thomson, the traveler, bore testimony after his 
visit in 1879. *' Where international effort has failed," 
he said, " an unassuming Mission, supported only by a 
small section of the British people, has been quietly and 
unostentatiously, but most successfully realizing in its 
own district the entire program of the Brussels Confer- 
ence. I refer to the Livingstonia Mission of the Free 
Church of Scotland. This Mission has proved itself, in 
every sense of the word, a civilizing center. By it slav- 
ery has been stopped, desolating wars put an end to, and 
peace and security given to a wide area of the country." 
For a hundred years the missionary enterprise has been 
doing this over the entire world, getting men acquainted 
with one another, showing the unselfishness that lies 
behind much that seems to be and often is so purely 
selfish. It has always been and is to-day an enterprise of 
tranquillity and of peace. 

It has been an agency of righteousness. As the years 
have gone by, it alone has represented in many non- 
Christian lands the inner moral character of the Western 
world. By our political agencies and activities we have 
forced great wrongs upon the non-Christian peoples — 
commercial exploitation, the liquor traffic, and the slave 
trade upon Africa and the South Sea Islands, the opium 
traffic upon China. Against these things the one element 
of the West that has made protest has been the mission- 
ary enterprise. Year after year in those lands it has 
joined with what wholesome moral sentiment existed 
among the people in a death struggle against the great 
iniquities that Western civilization had spread over the 
world. It has been an instrumentality of international 
righteousness. 



98 The New Opportunity of the Church 

It has been and is a great instrumentality of human 
service. It has scattered tens of thousands of men and 
women over many lands, teaching school in city and 
country, in town and village. It has built its hospitals by 
the thousand. It has sent its medical missionaries to 
deal every year with millions of sick and diseased peoples 
in Asia and Africa. It has been the one great, con- 
tinuing, unselfish agency of unquestioning, loving, human 
service throughout the world, dealing not with emergency 
needs of famine and flood and pestilence alone, but, year 
in and year out, serving all human need and seeking to 
introduce into human society the creative and healing 
influences of Christ. " It is they *' (the missionaries), says 
Sir H. H. Johnston, of British Central Africa, " who 
in many cases have first taught the natives carpentry, 
joinery, masonry, tailoring, cobbling, engineering, book- 
keeping, printing, and European cookery ; to say nothing of 
reading, writing, arithmetic, and a smattering of general 
knowledge. Almost invariably, it has been to mission- 
aries that the natives of Interior Africa have owed their 
first acquaintance with a printing press, the turning-lathe, 
the mangle, the flat-iron, the sawmill, and the brick 
mold. Industrial teaching is coming more and more in 
favor, and its immediate results in British Central Africa 
have been most encouraging. Instead of importing 
painters, carpenters, store clerks, cooks, telegraphists, gar- 
deners, natural history collectors from England or India, 
we are gradually becoming able to obtain them amongst 
the natives of the country, who are trained in the mission- 
aries' schools, and who having been given simple, whole- 
some local education, have not had their heads turned, 
and are not above their station in life." 



The War Aims and Foreign Missions 99 

Let any one who doubts the constructive influence 
of missions in molding the social life, in affecting insti- 
tutions, in establishing just trade, in creating and foster- 
ing industries, in making friendly producers and con- 
sumers, in purifying morality and elevating mankind, 
turn to the second volume of Dr. Dennis's ^* Christian 
Missions and Social Progress," and read there of the 
achievements of mission work in these spheres, and he 
will gain a new conception of the power and value of 
foreign missions. As Dr. Dennis shows, they have pro- 
moted temperance, opposed the liquor and opium traffics 
which are fatal to wise commerce, checked gambling, 
established higher standards of personal purity, culti- 
vated industry and frugality, elevated woman, restrained 
anti-social customs such as polygamy, concubinage, adul- 
tery and child-marriage and infanticide, fostered the sup- 
pression of the slave trade and slave traffic, abolished 
cannibalism and human sacrifice and cruelty, organized 
famine relief, improved husbandry and agriculture, intro- 
duced Western medicines and medical science, founded 
leper asylums and colonies, promoted cleanliness and sani- 
tation, and checked war. *' Whatever you may be told to 
the contrary," said Sir Bartle Frere, formerly Governor of 
Bombay, " the teaching of Christianity among 160,000,000 
of civilized, industrious Hindus and Mohammedans in 
India is effecting changes, moral, social and political, 
which for extent and rapidity of effect are far more 
extraordinary than anything that you or your fathers 
have witnessed in modern Europe." " When the history 
of the great African States of the future comes to be 
written," says Sir H. H. Johnston, bearing witness out 
of ample personal knowledge and experience, " the ar- 



100 The New Opportunity of the Church 

rival of the first missionary will with many of these new 
nations be the first historical event in their annals/* 

Foreign missions have been a great agency of human 
unity and concord. They, at least, have believed and 
acted upon the belief that all men belong to one family. 
They have laughed at racial discords and prejudices. 
They have made themselves unpopular with many repre- 
sentatives of the Western nations who have gone into 
the non-Christian world, because they have not been 
willing to foster racial distrust, because they have insisted 
on bridging the divisions which separated men of different 
bloods and different nationalities. We are talking now 
about building the new world after the war. But it 
would be hopeless if we had not already begun it. We 
are talking about some form of international organiza- 
tion. It may need to be very simple, with few and 
primitive functions, but it must come. And it can come 
only as first, we sustain in men's hearts a faith in its 
possibility; as second, we devise the instrumentalities 
necessary to it and make them effective; as third, we 
build up a spirit that w^ill support it. Across the world 
for a hundred years the missionary enterprise has been 
the proclamation that this day must come, and that some 
such international body of relationships as this, based on 
right principles, must be set up among the nations of the 
world. 

It would not be hard to go on analyzing further what 
the missionary enterprise has been doing. It has been 
doing peacefully, constructively, unselfishly, quietly for 
a hundred years exactly the things that now, in a great 
outburst of titanic and necessarily destructive struggle, 
we were compelled to do by war. I say it again, that 



The War Aims and Foreign Missions loi 

one of the most significant things of the day is to see how 
the great ideals and purposes of the missionary enterprise, 
that have been the commonplaces of some men's lives, 
have been gathered up as a great moral discovery and 
made the legitimate moral aims of the nation in the great 
conflict in w^hich we have been engaged. 

And now that the war is done the question looks at 
us squarely. Do we mean all that we said and fought 
for? If we were right then are we not bound to go 
straight on now and do by life in peace what we were 
ready to do by death in war ? The need for achieving the 
things we fought for is here to-day all over the world. 
The missionary enterprise is the honest effort to achieve 
them. 

And we need the missionary enterprise now, strong, 
living, aggressive; first of all because we require, more 
than we have ever required them in the past, every pos- 
sible agency of international good will and interpreta- 
tion. Why did that happen in Russia that did hap- 
pen, prolonging for many months the great struggle? 
We know why it happened — in part at least because 
of a lack of adequate interpretation of our own true 
ideals and national character. Men who had lived here 
in our own land, had gone back to Russia by the 
hundred, to misrepresent America. They said we were 
a capitalistic oligarchy, not a democracy, that privilege 
and not justice ruled our life. I suppose Trotzky had 
never been in a company of two hundred real Ameri- 
cans. He returned to Russia, not knowing the least 
thing of the real spirit of the American nation and our 
true political ideals, and the real heart of the American 
people; and the same ignorance which he carried back 



102 The New Opportunity of the Church 

with him is in no small measure spread far and wide over 
the world to-day. There could have been nothing more 
unwise than the proposition that we should recall in the 
war from Africa and India, Japan and China the men 
who are correctly interpreting to the non-Christian world 
the unselfish Christian ideals of our Western nations. 
In the early years of the war our Government sent to 
the consuls in China especially word that Americans 
ought not to come home; that if ever they were needed 
there, they were needed to-day that they might correctly 
represent what the moral purposes of America are, and 
that by their good will and friendliness, they might be 
true ambassadors of our spirit. We need not less to-day, 
but more than ever, the shuttles of sympathy and service 
that fly to and fro across the chasms of race. The mis- 
understandings of the world are a tragic thing. We 
little realize how deep and terrible they are ; the innumer- 
able millions of men on the other side of the world whose 
minds are unknown to us and to whom what we are 
thinking is unknown, in whose thought there has never 
entered the conviction of our unselfish interest in the 
whole human family, and of our desire not to injure but to 
benefit both ourselves and with us all mankind. As 
never before in the history of the world, we require 
every possible agency of interpretation, of international 
fellowship and brotherhood to be thrown across the 
chasms that separate the races and nations of men. 

President Wilson understood this. At the height of 
the war he wrote to a medical missionary who had asked 
his advice as to returning to China or entering the war: 
** I feel that I am by no means qualified to answer the 
question you put in your letter of March 9th, but it is 



The War Alms and Foreign Missions 103 

clear to me on general principles that we must not rob 
effort everywhere else in order to concentrate it in France, 
unless it is absolutely necessary to do so. It does not 
appear necessary at this juncture, and my judgment, 
diffidently expressed, would be that your duty still lay in 
China." 

And he had earlier written to some missionary workers 
in the South an equally strong statement : 

" I entirely agree with you in regard to the missionary work. 
I think it would be a real misfortune, a misfortune of lasting 
consequence, if the missionary program for the world should 
be interrupted. There are many calls for money, of course, 
and I can quite understand that it may become more difficult 
than ever to obtain money for missionary enterprises, but that 
the work undertaken should be continued and continued . . . 
at its full force, seems to me of capital necessity, and I for 
one hope that there may be no slackening or recession of any 
sort. 

" I wish that I had time to write you as fully as this great 
subject demands, but I have put my whole thought into these 
few sentences and I hope you will feel at liberty to use this 
expression of opinion in any way that you think best." 

We are needing to prepare for the great undertakings 
of peace that are now upon us. It may or may not be 
a true principle that in times of peace we should prepare 
for war; but there cannot be any doubt about its being 
a true principle, that in times both of war and of peace 
we should prepare for peace. In time of peace war may 
or may not come, but in time of war peace must and 
will come. And now that peace has come, whatever 
may be the decision regarding the continuance of arma- 
ments, there can be no doubt that our immediate duty 
is to confront the tasks of peace. Unless those tasks 



I04 The New Opportunity of the Church 

are met, any preparations for the future will rest on 
hollow foundations. Other agencies of sinister purpose 
were preparing diligently throughout the whole period 
of the war for this present time. And they are not 
relaxing their purposes to-day. Against these and all evil 
forces every energy of righteousness must be aroused both 
in America and throughout the world. Every unselfish 
purpose, the full measure of moral consecration, the uplift 
and inspiration of every great ideal and of unlimited tasks 
must be taken advantage of now if the soul of the nation 
is to be equal to its responsibility. We need every ounce 
of moral and spiritual resolution for the nation's sake. 
Whatever we subtract from the spiritual outgoing of 
the Christian Church we subtract from the vitality of 
the nation in its present struggle. 

Necessary as the great negative energies of destruction 
are, they can never achieve the things that have to be 
done in the world. This business of war has been an 
unavoidable business, but its result is to work structural 
changes. We cannot say that it cannot work any organic 
change, but if it does it is by reason of the thought which 
it embodies. Such work has to be done by great prin- 
ciples, by living ideals, by the Spirit of God. Mere 
mechanisms, the thunder of guns, the massing of bodies 
of men never can do it. They can build walls against 
the onset of wrong; they cannot replace it. We have 
to let loose the creative and constructive spiritual powers 
if that is to be done, and there is no creative and con- 
structive spiritual power the equal of that which Christ 
released. 

And in Christ alone to-day is the power of saving men 
and of redeeming society. To give Him to the world 



The War Aims and Foreign Missions 105 

IS to do the work the world needs more than it needs 
anything else. No man can do better with his life to-day 
or accomplish more for the world than by going out to 
acquaint men with Christ and to lead all nations to 
obey and follow Christ as Saviour and Lord. 

The Christian churches throughout the war manifested 
the spirit which must now have yet freer and richer play. 
Both in Canada and in Great Britain the foreign mis- 
sionary societies year after year during the war closed 
their books not only without a deficit but in many cases 
wath a surplus and with larger receipts than had ever 
come to them before. Our American foreign mission 
boards had the same experience. The year of the war was 
with many of them the year of the most generous sup- 
port of their work that they had ever known. 

Indeed, the work of foreign missions has never been 
stopped by war. The great Foreign Missionary So- 
cieties of Great Britain were launched in the midst of 
European wars, and if the earlier missionaries from the 
Continent had waited for times of world peace before 
setting out on their undertakings, they might never 
have gone. The first foreign missionaries from the United 
States, sent out by the American Board, sailed during 
the year of 1 812. If the Church could ever be justified 
in waiving her missionary duty in times of national diffi- 
culty it would have been during the Civil War. The 
Southern Presbyterian Church projected its foreign mis- 
sionary work then. To quote Dr. Houston's words, in 
a noble address delivered in Philadelphia in May, 1888, 
'* When in that day she found herself girt about as with 
a wall of fire, when no missionary had it in his power 
to go forth from her bosom to the regions beyond, the 



io6 The New Opportunity of the Church 

first General Assembly put on record the solemn declara- 
tion that, as this Church now unfurled her banner to 
the world, she desired distinctly and deliberately to in- 
scribe on it, * in immediate connection with the Headship 
of her Lord, His last command, '' Go ye into all the 
world and preach the Gospel to every creature,'* regard- 
ing this as the great end of her organization, and obedience 
to it as the indispensable condition of her Lord's promised 
presence.' '* And the moment the way was opened she 
sent forth her sons and her daughters. 

The experience of the missionary board of one of the 
churches in the Northern States during the Civil War 
is illustrative, I believe, of almost all. In the spring 
of 1862 the Northern Presbyterian Board reported that 
instead of ending the year with a heavy debt, as was 
seriously feared, it had been able to ^^ support the Missions 
in nearly all cases in their usual vigor, to send out new 
laborers, to occupy new ground in some instances, and 
to close the year in a satisfactory manner." The Board 
expressed the hope " that a not less vigorous support of 
this work will be afforded in the coming yeaf, and the 
trying discipline of Divine Providence and especially the 
influences of the Holy Spirit may lead our churches to 
reach still higher standards of giving." The Board ap- 
pealed accordingly for an increase of 25 per cent, in the 
gifts of the churches, in order that the work of the Mis- 
sions might not be reduced nor new missionaries kept 
at home. The General Assembly welcomed these views 
and rejoiced in the fact that the largest number of mis- 
sionary candidates ever reported was waiting to be sent 
forth. The following year the Board reported that none 
of the new missionary candidates had been kept at home 



The War Aims and Foreign Missions 107 

except for health or similar reasons. When the Board 
appealed to young men and women not to allow the im- 
pression that the funds of the Board would not permit 
them to be sent out to be made a rule of duty or to 
hinder them from offering themselves to the missionary 
service, the General Assembly endorsed this view, and 
in the Spring of 1864 declared: *^ New Missions are 
needed. Shall they be established ? Is it inquired. Where 
are the means? We answer. They are in the hands of 
the Christians, who are God's stewards. Let a proper 
demand be made. Let this Assembly call on the churches, 
and that call will be answered. The response will come 
to us in the spirit of that consecration in which all God's 
people have laid themselves and their all upon His altar. 
In the opinion of the General Assembly, the Presbyte- 
rian Church under its care should, during the ensuing 
year, increase the amount of funds put under the com- 
mand of the Board of Foreign Missions, for the spread 
of the Gospel among the heathen, to not less than three 
hundred thousand dollars." As the war drew to a close 
the Board reported that never in its history had there 
been times when the financial prospects appeared so 
dark. The rates of exchange cut the value of the Ameri- 
can bills in half. But the light broke through the dark- 
ness, and the Board reported in 1865, '* It has not been 
necessary to break up any of the Missions, to recall any 
of the missionaries nor to keep at home for pecuniary 
reasons any of the brethren who desired to be sent forth 
on this service." 

The Christian conscience of the nation during the days 
of the Civil War saw in the generous outpouring of 
life at the call of the nation not a reason for exemption, 



io8 The New Opportunity of the Church 

but a ground of appeal in the matter of missionary service. 
The Presbyterian General Assembly of 1865 resolved 
" That the work of Foreign Missions calls for expansion. 
The prayers and wants of our brethren in the field, the 
field itself white to the harvest, the loss occasioned by 
age, infirmity and death among the laborers, all appeal 
for an increase of men and means; while the voice of 
God's providence, in His favor to this work, clearly says 
to His Church ' Go forward.' The promptness, energy 
and abundance with which our young men have come 
forward during the past year to engage in our armies 
for the defense of our nation . . . should encourage 
Christians to pray for that increased devotion of our 
sons to the service of Christ, which is demanded to 
provide ministers and missionaries to go into the fields 
which are now open to hear the Gospel." 

The Church to-day cannot be justified in sinking to a 
lower measure of courage and devotion than marked our 
fathers in the days following the Civil War. The nation 
is vastly richer now than then, and abundantly able to 
meet every obligation, first among them its obligations 
to God and the Gospel. There are men enough and 
to spare for all the work that needs to be done — fore- 
most the great constructive work of spreading Christ's 
message of peace and good will among the nations, and 
planting everywhere the principles of the Gospel. The 
increase of suffering on account of war does not diminish 
the chronic suffering of Asia and Africa. The hungry 
of these lands are not less hungry because there is want 
in Europe as well. Preachers of the Gospel, medical 
missionaries, teachers and friends of mankind who will 



The War Aims and Foreign Missions 109 

serve the needy in the spirit of Christ are more needed 
throughout the non-Christian world to-day than they 
were before the war. And while all other duties must 
be done, these primary and continuing duties must not 
be left undone. The nation will be stronger for its 
task at home if it is faithful to its ministries of peace 
to all the world. 

And now will the men and women who have lives to 
give act upon a pinched and withholding principle ? Can 
we believe that the men who were willing to give their 
lives for the nation and the cause in the war will not 
be willing to give them for Christ and the world and 
this work now that the war is done? It is inconceivable 
that it should be so. The men who unselfishly gave 
themselves to the cause to which God called the nation 
and who in that cause counted everything loss — who 
deemed life itself merely the reasonable offering which 
it was their duty and joy to make — will not now, surely, 
when the war is done, be content to turn aside to selfish 
and easy lives. Surely they will want to carry forward 
in the days of peace the same ideals for which they con- 
tended in the time of war — the ideals of human brother- 
hood, of international justice and service, of peace and 
good will. 

And now is the time when men should face this issue 
of the principles by which they are going to live in peace 
times. Now is the time when thousands of men who 
have learned the unworthiness of selfish lives should 
resolve to give themselves to the Christian ministry, to 
missionary and social service, and to careers of philan- 
thropic and political and religious consecration. Millions 



no The New Opportunity of the Church 

of young Americans went on a foreign mission to northern 
France. Thousands of these men should go forth, now 
that the war is over, on the foreign mission of peace to 
Asia and Africa and Latin America. There are men who 
will read this to whom the missionary idea had never oc- 
curred before and there are others who have thought of it 
again and again, but who have evaded the missionary obli- 
gation. They say they never had ** a missionary call.** 
They do not plead that excuse when the nation asks 
them for their lives. Why should they need a different 
kind or degree or measure of call from Christ than they 
have had from the nation? There are men who, with- 
out a quiver, went across the sea and took whatever came, 
but who have been avoiding the missionary obligation, 
which does not ask them for any more. Why for the 
one and not for the other? ** We thus judge *' — we read 
the words of Paul, " We thus judge that One died for 
all, therefore all died; and He died for all, that they 
that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto 
Him who for their sakes died and rose again." 

For four years the world has poured out life and wealth 
without limit. It was a struggle which ought never to 
have been. But once precipitated there was but one 
thing to do and that was for an outraged world to go 
through with it at whatever cost and to spare nothing 
until the calamity was removed and the liberties of 
the world were secured. And now the struggle is past. 
Shall the sacrifices made for war be discontinued or 
shall we be ready to do for peace and for the coming 
of the Kingdom of righteousness all that we did for 
war and for the prevention of what we believed to be 



The War Aims and Foreign Missions iii 

the threatened destruction of the freedom of mankind? 
Were not those sacrifices rational only as we now com- 
plete and perfect them in their perpetual consecration 
to the establishment of the reign of Christ in human life ? 



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Christian Internationalism 



By WILLIAM PIERSON MERRILL 

Cloth, 12°, $1.30 

" An army pushing its victorious advance finds one stubborn 
stronghold which resists; and it reaHzes that it must capture 
that one center of resistance or its advance is imperilled. So 
Christianity, advancing to the control of the world's life, halts 
before this great citadel of International Relationships where 
pagan forces are still strongly intrenched; and it realizes that 
the whole program and hope of Christian Redemption are held 
back, thwarted, imperilled, until that fortress is reduced." 

Christian Internationalism lays siege to this fortress and 
marshals in force manifold considerations, political, social 
and religious, in support of the case for an immediate end 
of the old arbitrary conduct of nations toward each other 
and a beginning of a new era of peaceful, ordered freedom, 

CHAPTER HEADINGS 

CHAPTER 

I. The Function of Christianity in the World. 

II. The Old Testament and Internationalism. 

III. The New Testament and Internationalism. 

IV. Chriotianity and Internationalism. 
V. Democracy and Internationalism. 

I. America and Internationalism. 

II. Constructive Proposals for an International Order. 

VIII. Problems Confronting Internationalism. 

IX. Christian Principles Underlying Internationalism. 

X. The War and Internationalism. 

XI. The Church and Internationalism. 

XII. Conclusions. 



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The Coming of the Lord 

Will it be Premillennial? 

By JAMES H. SNOWDEN, D.D., LL.D. 

Professor of Systematic Theology in the Western Theological 
Seminary, Pittsburgh, Pa. 

Cloth 12°, $1.75 

The question of the second or final coming of Christ has been an 
important and at times an intensely interesting and stirring one from 
the days of Christ and his apostles to the present hour. The great War 
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Dr. Snowden's book is probably the first comprehensive and systematic 
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Dr. David Brov/n's well-known " Second Advent " appeared seventy 
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millenarian side but is now in some respects out of date. The present 
work is based on a broad study of the literature of the subject, the 
list of " Works Consulted " prefixed to it comprising about one hundred 
and twenty authors. The literature on both sides of the question has 
been read and the treatment of it in this book is characterized through- 
out by impartiality, fairness, and a sincere desire and effort to reach 
and state the truth. All difficulties are frankly faced, and the discus- 
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not a technical and dry book, but a live and interesting one, and even 
a sense of humor is not lacking in its pages. Its concluding chapter 
on " Is the World Growing Better? " is a notable piece of writing and 
is probably the best available statement and proof of an optimistic view 
of the world. 



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The Course of Christian History 

By W. J. McGLOTHLIN, Ph.D., D.D. 

Professor of Church History in the Southern Baptist 
Theological Seminary. 

Cloth, $2,00 

This volume has been written with a full and accurate knowledge of 
the subject gained from study in European Universities and teaching 
in one of the leading theological institutions of this country. 

While it is thoroughly scientific in spirit and is abreast of the latest 
developments, the author has at the same time preserved that lucidity 
and simplicity of statement and style which make the book interesting 
and readable for the general student. 

** The study of the course that has been taken by the Church in its 
extended life is most interesting and fascinating, when guided by one 
who is able to speak as a real master. . . , The growth and develop- 
ment of the church from its early days, on through the middle centuries 
and into modern times, is portrayed in a skillful and authoritative way, 
and much light is shed on the great controversies and councils, in the 
development of doctrines, the spread of heresies and the expansion of 
the life and work of the church." — Herald and Presbyter. 

" The volume is different from the general run of church histories. 
... It is readable, interesting and informing. The book is intended 
primarily for college students and is well adapted to this use. . . . The 
book is also well adapted to the use of Bible classes, mission study 
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Glothlin has done a splendid piece of work in this volume and made 
a real contribution to the literature on the history of Christianity. W© 
wish for this book a wide reading.*' — Review and Expositor, 



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RELIGIOUS HAND BOOKS 

i^Ne-w and Not Reprints) 
Each Sixty Cents 
THE NEW OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 

Preparing By ROBERT E. SPEER 

This volume very suitably follows Dr. Speer's The Chris- 
tian Man, the Church,^ and the War, dealing as it does with 
the present responsibility of the Church. 
THE CHURCH FACING THE FUTURE 

By WILLIAM ADAMS BROWN 

Dr. Brown discusses four big questions: First, Where the 
War Found the Church; second, What the Church did for 
the War; third. What the War did for the Church; and 
fourth, Where the War Leaves the Church. 
DEMOCRATIC CHRISTIANITY; SOME PROBLEMS 

OF THE CHURCH IN THE DAYS JUST AHEAD 

By FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 

" We have in mind the tasks of to-day as they confront the 
Christian Church," writes Bishop McConnell. 
GOD'S RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAR 

By EDWARD S. DROWN 

Dr. Drown discusses this very interesting question in terse 
and vigorous prose. 
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CRUSADE 

By LYMAN ABBOTT 

Written by one who has an exultant faith that never in the 
history of the past has there been so splendid a demonstra- 
tion of the extent and power of the Christ spirit as to-day. 
THE WAY TO LIFE By HENRY CHURCHILL KING 

A discussion of the Sermon on the Mount, similar to that 
in Dr. King's former book The Ethics of Jesus, Besides re- 
writing them, he has added material on the war and the 
teachinp^s of Jesus. 
THE CHRISTIAN MAN, THE CHURCH AND THE 

WAR By ROBERT E. SPEER 

Dr. Speer here discusses the essentials of a problem which 
has exercised Christian men since the beginning of the war. 
He deals with it sanely and in a manner that will be consid- 
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NEW HORIZON OF STATE AND CHURCH 

By W. H. p. FAUNCE 

" Broad, profound scholarship, close relationship with pro- 
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keen analysis and graphic statement are forceful elements in 
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